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Posts Tagged ‘storytelling’

Storytelling Quickens Cultural Intelligence

Posted in Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2012 |


Last month I visited Leon Mexico where I met the Citizen’s Observatory and together we all met the Mixteca indigenous peoples who have moved to the city. The Mixteca have created their own urban culture (beside the railway tracks) from the strength of the stories they bring from their traditional ways. Their stories of daily life, spiritual practice, making a living, raising children and respecting differences, quickened the way that we thought about making change in the whole city. Much to our surprise this catalyzed co-creativity that supported everything from reviving the city spirit and centre, to transportation, commerce, education and health care.

Stories have a way of linking the subjective and intersubjective realities in the city. They represents the interior realities of individuals and groups of people in the Human Hive. Sharing stories shares experiences that arise from peoples’ objective and interobjective exterior realities. They convey the values and visions of people who co-create all cultural expression in the city.

Taken together, we have four voices in the city who share their perspectives. Every language makes room for these voices by the use of pronouns indicating who is speaking their view: I, We/You, Him/Her, Them. These four perspectives are the voices of the four quadrants of the integral model of the city and the four particular voices of: the Citizen, Civil Society, the City Manager, and City Developer. Each of these voices contributes to the intersubjective discourse of the city.

One of my deepest learnings about stories comes from Barry Lopez,  He says, ” stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes, a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put stories in each other’s memories. That is how how people care for themselves.” (Crow and Weasel)

Following through on the power of storytelling for the wellbeing of the Human Hive, here are three simple rules that can quicken the experience of Integral City Cultural Intelligences:

1. Respect others – appreciate the differences that make a difference.

2. Listen deeply.- cultural communication deepens more quickly with adept listening.

3. Speak your story, and enable others to speak theirs – this co-creates communities of story tellers. As the stories complexify they eventually become stories of integral practise.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Cultural Intelligence Tells the Stories of the City Heart

Posted in Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , on July 20, 2012 |


Cultural intelligence represents the “We” life of the city. It is the beating heart of the Human Hive.   This heart-based intelligence embraces the relationships in the city.

These relationships transcend boundaries that both contain and separate families, groups, organizations and all the collectives of people in the city.  It includes the individual and the group voice; multiple levels of values; and both city cultures and rural cultures.

The voices of Cultural Intelligence tell the stories of the city, creating a heart-beat of the city that resonates to different rhythms, reflects distinctive heart-felt places within the city’s spaces and recalls the histories of the many cultures that now live in our cities.

City cultures depend totally on the quality of relationships. The culture of the city represents the lived values of its citizens. It is the perpetual barometer of “what is important around here”?

How we prioritize those values at home, work, play or in spiritual practise translates into the quality of our relationships and the intelligence that represents the city’s culture.

As our world cities have become more cosmopolitan, many cities now contain all the world’s cultures, belief systems and ethnic relationships within its boundaries. These kinds of “city limits” in fact are very complex and now create potential for unlimited possibilities. This cultural fertility is the seedbed of the Hive Mind that is gradually emerging as a new form of cultural consciousness (and an ever-expanding collective unconscious).

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Civility Cultivates Sustainability

Posted in C. Collective Intelligences, Inquiry, Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2012 | 1 Comment »


The magic of building community starts with small wins. That is one of the secrets that Milenko Matanovic, Founder of Pomegranate Center, shares with everyone he can.

Milenko, speaking at the Building Sustainable Communities Conference, was a gold nugget find!! He complemented my image of the human hive with engaging stories about practical actions that the Pomegranate Center  (in Issaquah WA) has catalysed during a series of remarkable community projects over the last 25 years.

Do you remember the last time you avoided a public meeting related to sustainability issues, you knew you should attend? Did you feel guilty because you knew the intentions were aligned with what you believed needed to be done? But did you feel defeated before you started because your experience at the last meeting was so depressing? Was it because the last time you went, you felt ignored? you were bored to tears? you hated the confrontations? you felt uneasy? nothing changed? Did you encounter what Milenko has called the 4 Horsemen of Community Inaction: NIMBY’s, naysayers, curmudgeons and grandstanders?

In terms of the human hive, these are the core of Conformity Enforcers, resistant to change that will offer resilience to sustain the hive. These folks are unwilling to listen or respond to any of the ideas put forward by the Diversity Generators.

But if you were at a meeting of the Human Hive, which Milenko facilitated, he would offer three core resources that would unsnarl the blockages and cultivate the community that can support sustainability. (These are documented in Pomegranate Center’s fast and free handbook – see the link below). Milenko shares simple guidelines of Civility, Inquiry and Creativity.

Civility lies at the core of Milenko’s Community Building approach. (It is related to the Intelligence we call Storytelling or Cultural Intelligence in Integral City.) The simple rules are:

  • Share airtime: Everyone participates; no one is allowed to dominate
  • Assume that together we know more: Work to understand the assumptions, opinions, and ideas of
  • others
  • Reject the culture of blame: Be tough on ideas, gentle on people
  • Put yourself in someone else’s shoes: Represent those not present

Inquiry complements Civility with its invitation to participate.(It is a close cousing to the Intelligence we call Inquiry Intelligence in Integral City.) Its simple rules are:

  • Open your ears and your mind: Listening is NOT just waiting for your turn to speak
  • Do your homework: Understand the problem and its history
  • Look for common solutions: Then commit to them
  • Seek the community’s highest good for both present and future

Creativity builds on Civility and Inquiry to enable differences to emerge shared capacity. (It is related to the Intelligence we call Meshworking Intelligence in Integral City.) The simple rules here are:

  • Forge Multiple Victories: The best ideas solve more than one problem at a time
  • Explore unconventional approaches: New conditions demand new solutions
  • Turn opposition into proposition: Instead of fighting a weak idea, come up with a better one
  • Transform differences into gifts: Arguing over the differences among us wastes money, time, resources, goodwill, and talent. Exchanging ideas with others leads to greater insights, and more inclusive, creative solutions
  • Change your mind in light of new information: Do your part to create an atmosphere where
  • meetings are about discovery and collaboration, not platforms for convincing others that your idea is
  • king
  • Maintain the balance between heart and mind, knowledge and intuition, expertise and passion

I recommend that you download your own copy of Pomegranate Center’s, (click and download) Building Better Communities Handbook - each page is full of processes and resources that build healthy and sustainable human hives.

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10000 Gardens Within Multiply Stories on Shiboard Learning Lab

Posted in Storytelling - Cultures, tagged , , on January 12, 2011 | 3 Comments »


Rumi said that “for every garden we tend without, we tend 10,000 gardens within”.

Such is the power of consciousness. It is our leverage beyond the material world into an imaginary/imagining world with infinite possibilities and directions for growth.

I am always looking for the natural laboratories that show us how communities self-organize and emerge into nodes and then constellations. Sometimes in such labs just a container or just a stage of emergence is visible in a short time frame. My recent cruise offered a case in point.

The cruise ship became the container for a temporary swarm of humanity to alight and engage with one another. On the surface we were 1330 individuals attended by 600+/- “officials” aka crew.  Thus our little floating city provided all the elements of a shore-side city to support the bio-physical survival of its inhabitants. We carried our resources and administrators with us in the vessel, replenishing them as our voyage progressed.

But what fascinated me, was that every person who embarked on the cruise brought with them in their consciousness, a whole world of their own — one that framed their likes, needs, wants and choices. In fact many people on this cruise brought whole families along with them. And each member of the family brought their own world. I watched these worlds interact with each other in mini-constellations – moving in nodes, forming and re-forming as they navigated around the ship. The individuals and the families broke away and allied with other individuals and families in a constant sway, like the sea life in a coral reef.  Given the schedules for eating and entertainment on the ship, these individual planets and family solar systems moved in and out of dining rooms and theatres like the very currents and tides on which we sailed. 

On this particular cruise, I was intrigued that almost everyone seemed to be reading something. A bloom of  books, magazines and Sudoku puzzles in old tech hardcopy and new tech ( I-pods, I-Phones, Blackberries, I-pads, Kindles +++) accompanied people to meals, the pools,  the bars, the shops, (the casino??? I didn’t check), the front desk, the outside decks and on excursions. When I imagined all the worlds these portable reading technologies offered to the human readers, I imagined a tsunami of worlds emerging in the minds of all on board. Each reading technology offered one or many worlds that expanded the world already existing in the mind of each person. Even if we only supposed that each person brought along one literary world to supplement the one in their own mind/brain, we easily doubled the planets and suns in the constellation on board the ship – probably each day.

Because let’s suppose those imaginary worlds – which rose and set like the sun each day – interacted with one another through conversation, inquiry and eavesdropping. As they did so, they were refined and redefined in each person’s mind – growing ten thousand stories within – as each and all tried to make meaning from the myriad of meanings they encountered. For a short time we were amazed that such a multitude of people (from 15+ countries and many languages) could negotiate their encounters with one another, with relative peace and goodwill. The stories we told ourselves from our 1330 times ten thousand gardens, were honoured as a micro-world of the larger world of peace and goodwill to which everyone aspired (especially at the Equinox, Christmas, New Year season).

And I imagine that it is the myriad world of possibilities — the ten thousand stories we re-grew every day — that gave us the flexibility to navigate unexpected shoals, rough waters and uncertain beliefs while we were in the safety of the container of our ship. It demonstrated what a miracle of blessing consciousness is. The storytelling that emerges from our unlimited supply of conscious connections. It makes so much more possible than just bio-physical existence — and it certainly enhances that in ways that are as uncountable as all the stars in all the galaxies. Just think about that the next time you are watching people interact in a single garden “without” — imagine how much more amazing are the stories they are telling themselves amongst the multitude of ”ten thousand gardens within”.

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