What is the practice of co-intelligence? Part 3
This is the third of six posts seeking to describe what it means to practice co-intelligence. (You can find the first post here and the second here.) I’m posting these to support the creation of what’s called “a community of practice” – a network of people who are seeking – together – to better understand and apply co-intelligence in their lives and their work. But even if you’re not interested in that, these new ways I’ve learned to describe co-intelligence might interest you. You can think of them as different windows into the vast and varied world of co-intelligence. THIS post shares six principles for practicing co-intelligence. See what you think. – Tom (PS: As you read, you may reflect on how this is what the Co-Intelligence Institute is all about – and that that’s what any support you might send us will be furthering in the world.)
3. Six principles for practicing co-intelligence
In general, practicing co-intelligence means we honor the value and potential of wholeness in our engagements with the world. This can include efforts like the following:
• We seek to understand more of the evolving whole. This includes a recognition that at any given point in any activity, there will be more going on and more possible than we currently know, and so we seek to engage in ongoing processes that can better embrace complexity and change.
• We seek to include more of the lives involved in any community or situation we are working in or on. This includes helping each of us become more generative, conscious, and capable as we engage in our inevitable co-creativity. We keep in mind that any local situation involves distant lives, more than human lives, and past and future generations, and we give them proper voice and consideration.
• We seek to nurture and engage aspects of wholeness – synergy, integrity, harmony, complexity, and all the rest – that will serve the ongoing life of the whole. We seek to understand and gain competence with as many of the gifts of wholeness as we can manage.
• We seek to recognize, heal, transform and extend relationships, networks and interdependencies. As part of this, we seek to discern the many dimensions of our own embeddedness in the vibrant webs of existence and to practice nonviolence, appreciation, gratitude and reciprocity to enhance the quality of our roles in them.
• We seek to engage, honor, nurture, and integrate multiples of all kinds – multiple ways of knowing and engaging, multiple perspectives, multiple types of people, cultures, fields of study, scales and domains of reality, and more. This includes making good use of polarities, paradoxes, challenges, problems, crises, and other things that usually seem to generate more dis- than co-.
• We seek to understand, use, and share forms, stories, and processes that enhance the capacity of whole systems to serve themselves and others in these ways. This includes developing and embedding these capacity-enhancing factors in collectives, cultures, and systems to elicit and support more co-intelligence in their normal operation.
To the extent we manage to do any or all of these things, we are being co-intelligent – embracing and engaging more of the whole of life. And, thankfully, we can all always become more co-intelligent – especially together.
Coheartedly,
Tom
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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440
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