Episode 22: New Beginnings & Governance
We spend so much time analyzing and choosing governance models. What if there is a different approach? Marti and Todd get into the dynamics of organizations that move beyond rigid structures and become negotiable in the experience of working together. They also introduce a new segment at the end of today’s episode: Takeaways.
From the Edge: Being a Person of Power (Marti)
Conscious Rant: Stop Managing Your Time (Todd)
Series: New Beginnings
We're at risk of mistaking the current surge of new energies and opportunities for chaos, instead of recognizing them as energies of a new beginning that have risen from what is completing. Marti and Todd began to wonder about all the things we're deeply familiar with that may be coming to completion, and what may be emerging as well.
Timeline
0:59 Todd offers context
4:19 What does “governance” mean?
7:41 Experiencing governance
10:55 Limitations of models
14:37 Talking through a case
19:45 Confronting uncertainty
25:03 Flows leading to frameworks
28:22 Encountering rigidity
30:29 The pitfalls of “how”
32:56 Who’s in charge?
38:05 Valuing each function
43:57 From the Edge: Being a Person of Power (Marti)
53:39 Conscious Rant: Stop Managing Your Time (Todd)
1:00:12 Takeaways
Quotes
“The challenge that we face in recording these conversations is that consciousness is not a set of rules, or best practices, or static knowledge that we can pass along. We’re playing with language that points to experience and what can happen when leaders—all of us—start to see the world in a different way, and allow our awareness to lead us and others without defining or controlling.” — Todd Hoskins
“Letting the flows of our uniqueness and the interactions between us create their own structures.” — Todd Hoskins
“An ‘about-face’ is required of us now if we’re to succeed in our role as crafters of a new world. Instead of asking our experiences, and our world, to serve our selves and our individuation, we must learn to serve our experience instead.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Are you looking for an experience or a definition?” — Marti Spiegelman (retelling an Andean story)
“Governance in a truly conscious system is not achieved by decentralizing or by controlling . . . It is achieved by completely different dynamics” — Marti Spiegelman
“In Western consciousness, our awareness is focused on language. We talk forms. And so we easily focus on a framework, a structure. People want the structure because they don't have the awareness to experience how a structure comes into be. So they have to have it given to them.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Consciousness produces frameworks.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Walk into experience to find more experience.” — Marti Spiegelman
“What is evolving does not have a destination.” — Todd Hoskins
“What are we going to create together? Rather than what are we going to choose based upon what's existed in the past?” — Todd Hoskins
“The way a conscious framework emerges is— there is a flow.” — Marti Spiegelman
“With governance, the biggest risk is not the model or the framework that's created. Its rigidity.” — Todd Hoskins
“The problem is not in the hierarchy itself; it's in the rigidity around it.” — Todd Hoskins
“If a team can start to feel like, ‘Wow, this is amazing how we work together. How did we pull this together? We need to codify this.’ Notice how quickly we go to rigidity instead of just allowing the the dynamics to carry us like a wave.” — Todd Hoskins
“The degree of our fluidity is the same as the degree of our negotiability.” — Marti Spiegelman
“If we are going to have conscious organizations, it's going to shift our understanding of who's in charge. We won't ask the question again. We will have a much broader . . . more intricate understanding of the whole organization and all of the parts—all the functions within it that create the organization. And we will know the value of each of those functions.” — Marti Spiegelman
“We have lost our capacity to instill the individual with a functional identity. Our identity needs to be in terms of the collective.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Allow ourselves to be governed by a larger force.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Language offers us a bridge between experience and definition. Looking at the roots of words is like discovering what the bridge is made of, and how it was built, and that gives us clues to our experience.” — Marti Spiegelman
“If we go deeper into the Greek root and its variations, we find versions of the word power that translate as potentiality and capacity. This implies something deeper than just the ability to act. ‘To be able’ – this speaks more of a state of being, implying the ability to act from an inner resource, an inner energy or knowledge, that has an expressive ability larger than itself. Potentiality and capacity suggest a fertile force that might drive germination and growth, not just the action of a force pushing on things.” — Marti Spiegelman
“What seeds are you tending? What processes of germination and blossoming are you stewarding? The leader is one who stewards—who focuses the flow of universal powers in order to create the seed, plant it, germinate it, and tend its blossoming all the way to fruition. Not only is there fruit for the current cycle of action, the fruit has seeds for more. The creation of abundance is assured into the future and the ‘person of power’ is the one who stewards the process, safeguarding and tending its evolution, rather than controlling it.” — Marti Spiegelman
“A person of power is someone whose individual identity is so well grounded that s/he is completely part of life – s/he may be well known but s/he does not operate apart from the collectives s/he serves. S/he is totally woven in, through vibrant relationships. It is this weaving which fuels their potential and capacity to be the steward of abundant processes.” — Marti Spiegelman
“Being woven into an organization, flowing your awareness along relationship lines so you are actively engaged in the dynamics of relationship, learning from your organization as you serve it – this is what a person of power really is – a well connected part of a greater whole, expressing a unique capacity in service to the whole.” — Marti Spiegelman
“A person of power is a person living in wholeness.” — don Eduardo Calderón
“The roots of our being modern people of power ARE in fact our inner potentiality, or fertility as the elders would say—our capacity to germinate and blossom that potential into states of fulfillment and wholeness. This is what it means to lead from being as a person of power. It also means that we focus on power as the energy of life itself. It means we live in the dynamics of life, no longer solely focused on outcomes, or endpoints, or the things we produce. It means we live in the dynamics of the current moment, in an unconditionally loving state.” — Marti Spiegelman
“The power to be a steward of life sources from our capacity to love, and the power to create abundance and wellbeing sources from our capacity for wholeness.” — don Manuel Quispe
“It’s only when we slip back into our scarcity mindset, focusing on what’s missing or wrong, using power to fix or control things, that we actually lose our ability to BE people of power, leading from that vibrant state of being whole, in love, fully alive.” — Marti Spiegelman
“To try and manage time is going to make you less effective.” — Todd Hoskins
“More than a century of ‘time management’ has yielded more anxiety than productivity.” — Todd Hoskins
“Setting the conditions for a flow state do not always make it happen. And yet we learn, which starts with getting out of our heads, that we can be in that timeless state more and more as we move our awareness off of expectations and ourselves.” — Todd Hoskins
“What if ‘using my time wisely’ could be translated as ‘being bound by convention’?” — Todd Hoskins
“Creativity is not managed. Time management is a product of the Machine Age, and Taylorism in business management—it’s all about control. The idea that we can control behavior in others is harmful. The idea that we can control our own time and how we use it blocks creativity and vitality.” — Todd Hoskins
“Questioning time management doesn’t mean floating on magic carpets through the clouds. It means being open and flexible. It means knowing what’s important and making adjustments. How you spend your time should, overall, reflect what matters and what you value. But we can’t plan that all out.” — Todd Hoskins
“Let’s stop this talk of managing our time. Let’s end the phrase of ‘time well spent.’ Who says that time is something you spend? Let’s start talking about our capacity to be aware of what’s moving around us, and our capacity to move with it.” — Todd Hoskins
Links
Rovelli’s The Order of Time
Credits
Theme music courtesy of Cloud Cult