Sourcing Collective Intelligence... Sacredly
A Simple, Life-Aligned Protocol for You & Your Community
It is not as hard as one might think to co-create contexts where collective intelligence emerges and is both respected and genuinely generative to collective agency.
The body must know these spaces instinctively. They are not defined by big data, or flashy mental models. Rather, they are spaces where the right and left brain are invited to participate co-equally, where the body, mind, heart and soul of many stakeholders dance in intersubjective co-sensing, and where stories and facts, frameworks and songs commingle. From here, a mutually felt experience of shared directionality has the potential to bloom.
Yesterday at the Funding the Commons conference at SF’s Frontier Towers, co-hosted by the Flourishing Systems Foundation, I hostessed a Worldview Circle exploring EARTH INTELLIGENCE & SACRED ALIGNMENT.
My task was to simultaneously bring forth the voices of 7 fellow domain experts while holding a community circle that invited other voices and perspectives to weave in the space.
To do that, I created a simple invitation, that I first shared with the 8 of us who had been invited to bring our voices.
I texted everyone this simple prompt:
Good morning!
I’m looking forward to sharing dialogue on Earth Wisdom & Sacred Intelligence with you.
We’ll be exploring the question:
How do we align human intelligence with the intelligence of living systems?
Think of our time together as a circle, not a panel. My sense for how to facilitate this while leveraging the genius of all the speakers is to open with a gentle framing of Earth Intelligence & Sacred Alignment, then invite 2-3 minute shares from each of the 8 speakers. Then, I’d like to open it up to everyone in the circle to explore the same question.
Suggested eco-systemic engagement protocols:
• Listening — Listen to the field, each other, participants, and the potentiality inherent in the inquiry
• Integrity — share from the integrity of your own experience and care
• Reciprocity — listen with as much attunement and generosity as you speak
• Complementarity — seek to add depth, breadth and counterpoint to the ecology of concepts, possibilities and ways of knowing already offered in the space.
In preparation, please consider the question (How do we align human intelligence with the intelligence of living systems?) in the context of the themes of Techno-Cultural Maturity, Funding the Commons, Flourishing Systems, and Intelligence at the Frontier.
When I opened the circle, I shared the format and protocols with the whole circle (a room full of about 60 people), invoking the room as a Council Circle, not just a panel discussion. I restated the question to the collective:
How do we align human intelligence with the intelligence of living systems?
Then, I named that the voices of others would be invited, though there would not be time for everyone to be heard. I asked if we could all embrace this? Everyone gently consented, and we began.
The resulting conversation was MAGIC. Every core speakers engaged exquisitely with the protocols, particularly around sensitivity to complementarity.
SO MANY diverse, yet resonant perspectives were shared, each one a jewel building on the next.
That circle could have gone on for three hours. The general sense in the room when we ended was that we had experienced a true form of collective sense making that helped move a very hard conversation forward in meaningful ways.
I think this particular question should be asked and sensed into by communities, organization, and businesses everywhere. Now.
I’d like to name that these protocols did not emerge through me alone. They mirror a pattern of life-aligned co-sensing that I first heard articulated by elders carrying the teachings of The People From the Heart of the World — the four indigenous tribes inhabiting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia are the Kogi (Cogui), Arhuaco (Ika), Wiwa (Sanha), and Kankuamo.
When I asked my teachers whether I should attribute these teachings to The People from the Heart of the World, they said something like, “No. We do not need to be named. These are Life’s principles. Please live them and share them through your own listening.” They have become central alignment principles throughout my work. And, I choose to attribute them, even though the people who carry them do not have a need to be named.
For me, these four principles provide a profoundly refined, eco-stystemic, and (critically) embodied way of aligning sensemaking with Life. The kind of intelligence that arises from them is different in kind from more left-brained ways of knowing. I have come to think of this kind of intelligence as Origination, or intelligence that is authentically aligned with the mind and body of Life moving in harmony with itself.
Yesterday was proof that there’s some honest truth to this.
I invite you to open source these eco-systemic/meta-relational protocols and this inquiry into Earth Intelligence & Sacred Alignment in your facilitation and community weaving — with attribution.
~ With love