What is the practice of co-intelligence? Part 6 – The inclusiveness challenge – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

This is the last of six posts seeking to describe what it means to practice co-intelligence. The full series is here:

1) The simplest way to look at it
2) Practicing co-intelligence as a special form of aliveness
3) Six principles for practicing co-intelligence
4) Practicing co-intelligence as a kind of inquiry
5) Practicing the ten qualities of co-intelligence
In this post I explore the challenges of inclusiveness
6) Meeting the challenges of the co-intelligence inclusiveness principle

If you’ve read any of these essays, I’d love to know how they seem to you. How would you feel to be part of activities that took such things seriously? Imagine: What would the world be like if millions of people and thousands of institutions took them all seriously?

Working on this is what the Co-Intelligence Institute is all about – and what your support will help us contribute to the world. Go ahead and do it! 🙂 – Tom

6. Meeting the challenges of the co-intelligence inclusiveness principle

The inclusiveness principle exists because co-intelligence is most centrally about wholeness. And seeking to include all parts and aspects of a whole is an ideal in co-intelligence work. We seek to move ever closer to that ideal.

It is, of course, natural for practitioners to run into challenges applying this principle. For example, limited resource availability (time, funding, institutional restrictions, personal capacity, and so on) limits how many and what kind of people and information can be included in a public or stakeholder deliberation. Or the undeveloped cognitive capacities of a child may limit how much of an answer to their question we can provide.

Ultimately, it is impossible to include everyone and everything – the ultimate Whole – in any given situation. So here I want to offer a few very general guidelines about how to think about and go about pursuing this tricky objective.

First, of course, we need to realize that, that the inclusiveness of co-intelligence is more a vision to be pursued than a goal to be achieved. We can work towards a vision of “including the whole” just as we can work towards a vision of a “just” society. We may never arrive at total inclusiveness or absolute justice, but striving towards such inspiring visions helps us build progressively more co-intelligent approaches and progressively more just societies.

So here are six overall guidelines to help us envision and pursue co-intelligent inclusiveness.

We believe that our activities and societies can be more co-intelligent to the extent that we:….

1. Seek to avoid excluding things – people, ideas, activities, perspectives, modes of knowing, contexts, etc. – in ways that would naturally tend to generate collective stupidity and folly over the long haul (e.g., due to bias, conformity, and corruption, etc.).

2. Seek to include everything that could help us generate potent collective intelligence, wisdom and broad benefit over the long haul (such as quality information, consideration of diverse perspectives, systems thinking, and so on). Hint: In doing so, the diversity, relevance, and quality of interactions among what’s included are usually far more important than the quantity of what’s included.

3. Take individual and collective action guided by what we learn as we seek to apply these principles.

4. Learn from reality about the wisdom of our actions (by gathering feedback, studying results, periodically deliberating newly on the same topics, etc.). In any case, reality will reveal any important factors we overlooked and offer new insights and possibilities – which, if we are open to them, we can take into account and do better.

5. Aspire to push inclusion as far as we can manage – and get creative about new forms of inclusion (like using random selection to create a microcosm of a population or adding youth to conversations about the future). And we work on being humble about the limits of what we can do, rather than being arrogant about our brilliant choices. We remain always open to “what else” we might include and how we might do it.

6. Finally, very importantly, we notice when what is necessary or life-serving to include or take into account is made “unrealistic” by systemic, cultural or situational factors. This recognition leads co-intelligence change agents to participate in efforts to transform those factors. The calling to “include the whole” includes a calling to make societies where more of “the whole” is more readily and creatively welcomed.

But what is enough? At many points in this process, we face the question of when to stop including things – kinds of people and information, etc….

I choose to apply the six “steps” above, as stated, stretching as far as my constraints allow and always aware that I can’t include everything that ideally would be included. I sometimes even adventurously include some things that are not obviously relevant, but might stimulate creative aliveness in the subsequent interactivity – and then I stand ready to learn from whatever happens. I think in terms of “good enough” while being aware of “never enough” and leaning towards completeness.

Others prefer to “discern” what is enough, sensing into the specific realities, needs, and purposes involved in the situation. Their approach assumes that at any given point, there is an enoughness that can be seen or sensed with the right attunement to the situation and to the unique nature of relevance in that situation. This approach leans towards the enoughness of appropriate simplicity and the need to avoid “too much” as well as “too little”.

In practice, these two approaches can complement each other or be part of each other, although some practitioners lean more one way or the other.

While the above guidelines may seem overly general, there’s much we can and need to know about how to do each one of them. Something a diverse community of practice can give us is opportunities to learn better ways to do the six things above, as groups, communities, whole societies and civilizations.

Coheartedly,

Tom

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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6. Meeting the challenges of the co-intelligence inclusiveness principle

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