The Problem With "Solving Problems" — Living Between Worlds 6.2

Welcome everybody. This is Living between Worlds for February 19, 2005. We're in the sixth year of these conversations about the challenge, mystery and opportunity of living between worlds with grace, dignity and power. We started these calls in the early days of the pandemic, inspired in part by Antonio Gramsci's observation just about 100 years ago that now is the that the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born, and now is the time of monsters. And if there was ever any doubt, if that quote was apt, here we are now. If I say problem, what do you say? Put your answer in the chat, I think, I hope I said 2025. Brad. I say problem. What word comes to mind for you? Good, interesting, unusual group. Solution, solution, solve it. Opportunity, challenge, and others. You know, the usual response is problem, solution. We have problems, we solve them. Amory Levin's often observed that the cause of most problems is solutions. But you know, that may not be the best way to frame the situation that we're in. There are problems perhaps with no solution. Ryman's hypothesis in mathematics, if you're familiar with that, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, perhaps no solution or no apparent solution. But that too may not be the best way to go at it. So we've invited as our guest conversant this month Chauncey Bell, a dear and old friend, old and all the meanings of that word, a master consultant who's delivered massive value for clients in many sectors with a most unusual approach that centers language and the conversations that we have with each other and the conversations that we have with ourselves as a key to unlock the situation that we find us in. Chauncey's described this tangle of problems, not just the global ones that we're in now, but many that humans encounter not as problems and solutions, but as messes. Chauncey, how do you orient in a.

World of message Now I'm going to give solution like answers that are not going to get us very far, but can begin the triggering carefully and respectfully. If it took us as long as it's taken us to get into this situation, then why do we expect that.

In.

A few moments in a sound bite, I'm going to have an answer that's going to sensibly say something in response to that question. Gil we don't, but we don't expect it. But we act as if we do expect it. I have been quoted as saying that when an American is asked a question, very often that person does a terrible thing. Pause. The answer is what we do is we answer the question and forget what the question opened up as a space for examination of life. Questions are far more interesting than answers. Most of the time. Much of the time, anyway. You begin there. Where should we go? As we were talking ahead of time here, you and Ken and I were going to have some conversation among ourselves to begin with and then invite others to join us in the conversation. I can say a couple of other things that occur to me as we're entering. What are the expressions that we have for the multiplicity of messes that we're facing right now? Biology, climate, technology, et cetera. There are names in which people are trying to catch all of the messes all at once.

Lately, people are saying metacrisis and polycrisis a lot. I get a little itchy when people say the polycrisis, as if there's one definable bounded mess called the polycrisis. It's many, but those are the terms that are starting to orbit.

And you know that one of the places where I go when we get into that start of a conversation is I begin to think about what's listening to you as you're saying that here, this animal listening to you has a thing called a nervous system that we think we understand something about. And that nervous system is vastly insufficient for dealing with the. The realm that you open with a word like the poly crisis. And as if we. It's terrible enough that we think that we can write a book about the poly crisis and have it captured there, but we don't know how to think about what is going on with individuals participating in a conversation with each other. Having forgotten that before I can be I, before I can be Chauncey Bell, I'm a certain kind of we, because we share here in this moment, we're sharing the English language. And that is not my language. That's our language. And then there is a certain we that is formidably senior to anything that I might say. Anything that you might say, even as we. Even as we work to listen to each other. So then we have a big mess. We not only have a variety of messes that we're paying attention to, but we have another mess that has to do with what we're doing is we're speaking and listening to each other. Now, I don't think that that's necessarily a good place for us to launch in this conversation, but it's. But one of my ambitions in this conversation is to. Is to produce mischief in our understanding of the moment that we're in, where Mischief has these two parts. And, you know, children enjoy doing mischief with the adults around them. I enjoy doing mischief with the bosses that I interact with when I'm working as a consultant. Because if we don't do some mischief to begin with, we assume that the foreknowledge and prior experience that people have is all that we need to go forward into the world that we're encountering. And it's not. We are vastly, as I said, we are vastly insufficient for dealing with the world that we have entered. Right now.

Though, you're not inclined to cause mischief just because you're a playful child, but because you see something that happens when you do something that opens up, different possibilities appear to the bosses that you're working with, whomever or perhaps with us in the room, you know, you. You offered a couple of pieces of mischief already, saying that there's. We before. I. I think many of us might assume it's the other way around and that we sort of grope for an identity of. In common out of a personal one. You talked about the mystery of what happens when we are speaking and listening with each other. Why don't we start with that second one?

Well, I. In. In the piece that I wrote a long time ago that I called nine principles for nine principles in which I navigate in the world, the last of the nine principles says design is the word I use to the building of alternative. Of bridges to building of bridges to alternative futures. Should I say that again? Yes. Design is the word I use to talk about the building of bridges to alternative futures. For those of you who can remember it, there was a wonderful movie called the Bridge over the River Kwai many, many years ago. And in that. In that movie there was a.

There was.

And I think it was set in. It was set in some Asian country, maybe Vietnam.

I believe it was Burma.

And there were bamboo bridges over a miasma of messes of marshes and so on and so forth. We think of ourselves as walking around on solid ground, but really we don't. We walk around on linguistic ground. Everything that we think we see, everything we think we understand, we have language between us and it. Or mediating how we understand what's going on. And I think of the language that we have mediating us like the bamboo bridges that showed up in the movie the Bridge over the River Kwai. And when I'm working with clients, one of the things I listen carefully too, is how they understand the bamboo bridges that keep them out of the mess and muck that is below them that can't be made sense of. And so what we have is we have our own versions of bamboo bridges in which we understand the world. What are we doing here? Well, I'm not going to give name to it, but you all. We all have names for what we did to be here with each other. And we. And we think of this as all real. I think that. That my eyes are like two cameras taking photographs of what I see in front of me. And you have the equivalent. But if we go deeply into the biology and look at what the.

The.

Biologists and physicians and neurologists and so on say about sight, a better metaphor would be, I have two spectacularly fast painters sitting inside my eyes that are fulfilling requests from the brain. Tell me what I'm looking at. And. And the eyes are feeding stuff. And most of what we think we see is actually made up by the brain. Now then, life is mostly like that. Mostly it's made up. And we walk on bamboo bridges as we are walking through life. And those bamboo bridges are made up of language. When I'm talking to clients, I'm listening to see what their worlds look like with a presupposition that their worlds are like bridges, not real. We talk to each other in the interpretation that we're actually describing things, but. But we're not. Most of the time we're describing impressions, interpretations, all kinds of other things, but.

We'Re not describing things. We're certainly not even describing the same things because each of us has our own painters with our own interpretations of what the sensory data is. How do you listen to people to detect something about the bridges? Rickety bridges, let's say, to detect the bridges that people have constructed for themselves. How do you listen for that? And what do you observe?

Well.

I have learned over the years, you know, that I have. On the one hand, my parents are from Scotland, from a Scottish heritage, and therefore monocultural. And I'm remarkably monocultural. I don't have all kinds of different. But then I have spent my life in multicultural environments and. And that has helped me to understand what you just said in my own way. And then I fell in love with Irish poets, among others, and English literature when I was at university. And I. I listened, for example, to Kate, to take the example of your friend long ago, he began to rest his elbows on the phrase sustainable. And I began to think about what is this sustainable thing that he's talking about? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was kind of a sneaky word, a word that is that pretends to be solid as a rock, but is actually not and doesn't. What it does is it invites us to make interpretations and to live with it in strange ways.

I would say, Chauncey, that it's precisely intended to do that.

The word sustainable.

Yeah. To not provide a definition, but to provide a provocation for an exploration.

Well, I think that that is. You haven't said that quite that way to me in the past, but I really like what you just said. I think that probably that's not the case for many of the use moments when the word is being used right now. I think it's tending to be used to complain about people who are not paying attention to certain things.

But it's also. It's also not used that way by the people who are setting up rating systems and scoring systems and ranking systems for a company. Is or isn't. Or is good enough or is not good enough.

Right. You know, I agree. You know that one of the things that I am paying a lot of attention to right now is how the question of how we in the west can learn to do a better job of having conversations with each other. And I think it's terribly important that we pay attention to that, especially in the moment that we have lots of people who are intending to create messes in our attempts to have conversations with each other, to create, for example, mutual vilification among people who haven't grown up together, who haven't spent the last 10 years going to the same parties and spending the time in the same backyards with each other. We, we are being. Have been being. We have been trained, we're getting trained to vilify each other, to say what terrible things they are doing or they are thinking, etc. And I think this is an important question for what we're doing right now. Now I'm a little bit lost in the conversation, Gil. So anybody else who's listening and a little bit lost, then I've successfully led you to the same place that I am in the conversation. And I apologize for any dissatisfaction or disrepute on this. Something that.

I'm not going to apologize for that I'm very happy if people are uncomfortable in the conversation because I have the interpretation that something can come out of that discomfort. That'll be interesting. Ken, you want to step in here?

Yeah. When we were planning this the other day, Gil Chauncy and I had a conversation about what to talk about here. One of the things we talked about with regard to messes is that they're essentially what Ron Heifetz would call adaptive challenges. And adaptive challenges where your way of thinking is insufficient to what you're facing. So we have to learn new ways of thinking, which is one of the most challenging things ever to attempt to actually find the edges of your thinking, peel them back, and say, wow, this bridge is built on bamboo and it is sinking into a marsh. Or I couldn't help but remember, if I'm recalling correctly, that the bridge over the Rukrai was built by prisoners of war. And just as the train was about to approach, the Japanese had to build it. They blew it up. So we are in the process of blowing up a lot of our bridges, and therefore we really need to come up with new bridges, new ways of understanding. And that requires talking with people who have really different views than we do and going, I may not agree with you, but there's got to be some legitimacy in there. There's got to be something. Because you're holding this as a. As a valid point. What can I appreciate about this? And how can I. How can I work with you on this as opposed to I don't agree and therefore you're bad? I think that's where so much destructiveness of social media is happening, where people are just saying, I don't agree and therefore you got to be bad. How do we build those bridges? Is a question that's really interesting to me. One last point, Chauncey. The first time I met you was around 01. I think you came to New Ventures West. I gave a master class and you said, I'm going to use language in a way that's going to challenge your nervous system. And I always remembered that because it's like we need our nervous systems challenged by language. So let's challenge some nervous systems here today.

Gorgeous comment, Ken. One of the things that I particularly like about the bamboo bridges image in the Bridge over the River Kwai is that it reminds me that we, in order to do anything that is going to be healthy in the situation that we're in, we need to accept that we have a hell of a lot to do with the invention of the future in language, ourselves. And I've dropped in on this conversation in past and I would say that generally the people who are here have wrestled with and often thrown away the idea that we're victims of our circumstances. That if you are listening well, you have concluded that you personally have something to do with the future that's coming. My interpretation is that we have a great deal to do with the future that's coming. By calling for it, by fighting against it, by vilifying it, by ignoring it, etc. Etc.

So, Chauncey, these days, in these circumstances.

Let me get one more second, please, and don't forget where you are. Come right back at me. But the point of the bridges is that it's all bridges. And then. And then the reality that I operate in, that I live in, is a reality that I have a great deal to do with constructing. Keep going.

Yeah. So in. In that setting, Chauncey, where there is, there's dismay, there's outrage, there's vilification, there's helplessness, there's all sorts of rampant moods and conversations going on. I am party to many of these myself, in various mixes.

Yep.

How do we design? How do we cultivate a place to stand, to. To be able to build better bridges for ourselves, better bridges with each other? To design, I think you said to design. As the practices of building bridges, what are the practices that are involved here in being able to orient into these messes, to stand in them, to create something that we care about, that takes care of the things we care about with other people? So there's a project here that's. I. I don't know. I know the words are not going to be adequate here, that it feels something like individual and something like us together, although the boundary between those has been mildly blurred for me.

Sorry, what.

What are. You know, what are the practices that you have found helpful in confronting those challenges?

So. Comes back to the moment where we started the conversation with the question that you began with. And now I'm going to give another short answer, I think, and let's see what it does for us. The two of you, Gil and Ken, know that I. Frequently, when I'm asked the question, how are you, Chauncey? I answer the question in the following way. I say, well, when I set aside everything that I can't control, I've never been better. And that I didn't discover until, I guess, yesterday in our conversation that that's. That's a version of my mother's rendition of the Serenity Prayer. I had never noticed that I was doing that, but I've always intended it to be an answer that would bring a smile to the face of the person to whom I'm talking first and second, would bring. An existential possibility to someone else's world. Because I don't think that most people. I think that we still are in a world in which, as individuals, we think that we control various things and we Consider ourselves individuals before we are I'm I before I'm we. Many years ago, when I was. When I was leaving the congregation I belonged to in San Francisco Bay Area, I prepared a sermon. I prepared myself to give a sermon in which I was going to explain why I'm we before I'm I. And I failed utterly to be able to figure out how to say that. I said it in this conversation by saying, well, we share a language, and it's our language, not my language. And without that language, I can't have. And there is no I. The self that I have is a construction that's done in that language. But I tried to figure out how to do a certain. And I failed utterly to put that together. I've noticed, in addition to the little greeting of when I set aside, etc. Etc. I've noticed that people in some simple parts of our understanding of life will explain that there's that which I know and that which I know that I don't know, and that which I don't know that I don't know. And it's the third part that is where the mystery lies and we get lost. Except that what I've discovered is that in what I know that I know, there's a great deal that I thought that I knew that is either mystery or unknown. I cite, for example, the biome and the current condition of modern medicine. Allopathic medicine is a place where we can see that we don't know a great deal of what we thought we knew. Then there is confusion and. And what does our friend Flores call it? Puzzle. Not puzzlement, but perplexity.

He calls it.

Say it again.

He calls it perplexity. And he observes that there's good perplexity as well as bad perplexity.

Yeah.

So.

Interesting notion.

So there's. And our capacity to declare ignorance is in some ways, for me, more interesting than my commitment to be a learner, be a student of this, that, or the other thing. I think I gain more ground by declaring that I will never know anything about the US Tax code, for example, and a variety of other things, and I will depend upon other people to find out about those things. So the capacity to declare I'm going to remain ignorant about something is a powerful way to create room for myself, for being in the world.

Now.

What have I done, Gil?

Well, you've. You've brought me to remembering how often lately I find my. I find myself saying I don't know in the face of, you know, in the face of looking at the world and watching the news, I. I certainly don't know what's going to happen. You know, I don't know what to do. I'm noticing what doesn't feel like retreat and avoidance, but a slowing down of like, not feeling. Feeling like I need to jump into action, but I need to just sort of settle and walk. It's a version of the serenity prayer. Granted, things not in my control, just looking for the pieces that might be in my control, where I might have some agency and ability to move something forward in a way that's. That contributes and doesn't make the messes messier. Would this be a good time to share your nine principles?

Sure.

For navigating?

Sure.

I am happy to do that.

Ken. Are you bringing that up or am I?

I am. Hold on just a second. Okay, let me find it. I do have it open somewhere on my computer.

Here we go.

You all see that?

Okay.

By the way, you have tabs at the top of your screen. You can look at the assembled faces or you can look at this slide. You can toggle between them at your choice.

I see them pretty good, Ken.

Okay, now let me. Let me. As background, I found myself in deep disagreement with a group of students of the work of Fernando Flores. At one point. And I. And I said, here's my interpretation of what I've been learning here, let me just read it. So you get in my voice and I'll do it quickly and then we can see what else.

Then we'll. Then we'll open up.

Yeah. So we are autonomous, responsible, biological, historical and linguistic beings. We invent ourselves. Our futures, our communities, institutions, tools, practices, and our understanding of all else in language. The kind of beings we are live in language. That's Heidegger. Anxiety and unsettlement are constitutive of the kind of beings we are. Our languages, ourselves, our communities and are contingent phenomena. What we listen to and how we listen is and are shaped by and disclose the concerns, moods, and habitual ways of being that constitute us. We are creatures of habit, shaped by and shaping historical practices. And we are far more malleable than the prevailing common sense would suggest. Entrenched, archaic and impoverished interpretations about what human beings are and about what it is to be human contribute strongly to the difficulties we have in coordinating with each other. We take stock of ourselves and our world, notice changes and open possibilities for actions with assessments and assertions. Let's another guy. 8. We take responsibility for the construction of our futures by making requests, offers, promises and declarations and Nine Design is the name we give to the practices of building bridges to alternative futures.

Thank you for that. So, assembled multitudes, what's provoked in you by either these nine principles or the conversation we've been having over the last half hour?

I'm going to stop the share so we can see each other.

Well, we can. You can, you can leave it up.

I'm going to paste it. I'll paste it into the, into the chat.

Okay, great. So raise your hand. Thank you. You're queued up in turn. Tom and then David.

Yeah.

Ken and, and Gil and Chauncey. Thanks for convening today. You know, Gil, when you, when you prompted the question at the beginning and you used the word problem, the.

The first thing that arose for me was story.

Not. I didn't go to solution. I didn't go. It was just problem according to who? And as we've been in this conversation or, you know, listening to Chauncey and the three of you, that's, that's what was alive for me was just the. Is it a problem according to who and who's in charge and, you know.

All of the.

Ways we can take that conversation. Very nice.

You want to respond to that?

No, I just. I said very nice. And I was thinking of. In the book that I wrote.

That.

I published, anyway, the book of my essays that is published, I quote Seth Godin as saying the following about what happens when we. He says. He says if we give an isolated community access to the Internet very quickly, the quality of life will improve, time will be saved, research into proven solutions will produce value and people will become connected to a larger population. Those connections will lead to productivity and learning. And then soon thereafter, thereafter, they will become less happy. Not because they're worse off, but because the dominant media narratives that arrive exist to make them feel insufficient, inadequate, or simply jealous at how green the grass is over there. Our narrative defeats our surroundings. Every time he says, you remind me of that. Thank you. Jane has her hand up.

And who else said, yeah, but actually David has his. Had his hand up before. So let's go to David first. I want to.

Jane, thank you. I'm inspired by Ken's comments and by the reference to bridge. I'm here because I see myself as a bridge. I receive mail from the right, from the left. People on the left are. Have their hair on fire, are freaking out. People on the left, excuse me, people on the right, including myself, are delighted to see profound change starting to happen to this country. And I, I would assume that my delight is not shared by this group. But I stand ready to engage with you. And I hold a, a worldview that is markedly different from that of the typical person on here, because I'm convinced that the government and media have been profoundly lying to us for decades and have created a very false picture of reality. So, again, I'm prepared to engage. I'm not here to provoke. But I can trade barbs with anyone if you're so interested. Delicious, David. I'm, I'm certainly not interested in trading barbs. I celebrate what you just said. I, I. One of the things that I do, I think, I think mostly his, certainly historically, mostly I'm on the other side, but I refuse to have at it with the vilification that I hear going on around the world right now, because I'm certain that we need to be listening to each other and talking to each other. Everything that I am interested in seeing happen in the world, I am sure, starts in conversations. And vilification is, for example, one sure way to make sure that we don't have good conversations. So where you're standing as you sped said what you just said, I celebrated and am delighted to hear you inviting conversation.

I am, too, David, and I appreciate both what you said and the way you said it. I'm also mostly on the other side, except when I'm not, and sometimes I'm on the other side of the other side. And I feel very clearly the poverty that I, and I think most of us live in, that we don't have opportunities to speak to people like you or people who share, not people like you, people who have the perspectives that you have. I've been saying lately that I live in a bubble, in a bubble, in a bubble. And so having the broader conversation is a real challenge. One note on that that really provoked me lately. There was an interview in the New York Times, I think it was last week with Steve Bannon, you know, Trump's Rasputin or Dugan or however you want to put him. And I was stunned that his analysis of the political situation in the United States that gave rise to the election of Donald Trump was almost identical to the analysis of a guy named Bernie Sanders. Two people farther apart, I could not imagine. And their analysis shared a lot. Where they went with that was very different. They went in very opposite directions with that interpretation. But the interpretation had an enormous amount of commonality to it. And how I interpreted that was there's an opportunity for a different kind of conversation and a different kind of connection and maybe some other strategies.

It's called a horseshoe Politics.

One name given to it. Sure. Anyhow, David, thank you. We've got Jane up and then Alan Haber.

I for one would like to hear a lot more of that barb filled perspective because I think we're in the land of distinguishing, of dropping the word problem and facing up to the word consequences. Consequences is in a polarity with truth. Problem is in a polarity with solutions. And I think we need to move closer to reality, to truth and we need to grasp consequences. And a lot of those consequences are ecological consequences. Many of them are psycho emotional sort of soul based consequences in the human being. And I'd love to know more about David's perspective on politics. I feel there's a a difference between malevolent destruction, Cruelty being the point of the destruction of sadomasochistic politics of extreme temperaments like dictators tend to be and destructuring, reassembly, experimentation, Puzzle puzzle solving, Logistics of society, logistics in economy. And the consequences I feel that most need examining are the consequences of the framework or the viewpoint that economists don't. Classical economists don't properly understand debt and they don't understand the role of debt in, in fiat currency governments that can issue the currency that starts the economy rolling and that regulates it pulling money in and out of the economy as things roll along. So I refer people to the work of a venture capitalist named Richard Vague V A G U E. He's with a formerly of Gabriel Capital and now currently of something called Tycos. He's trying to teach new understandings of the role of debt in our economy and our relations with each other. He promotes the notion of debt forgiveness in some rather interesting ways.

And.

We sure do need the likes of David Graeber in our ranks. We surely do.

We surely do. Thank you, Jane. Chauncey, want to respond.

Briefly? Jane, your speaking is very sweet and is full of affection for life. And I can only celebrate that at the same time I listened to music of a time when we have not done a good job of distinguishing between assessments and assertions. John Austin was a British don who said to his amazement, look at this. There are these. There are these verbs in the English language that don't behave the way verbs are supposed to behave. They don't talk about the movement of things. They invent the language, they invent the future, they invent the world. And he distinguished between what he calls assessments and what he calls assertions. And assertions can be true and false and assessments can never be true and false. The assessments are always interpretations and opinions and we don't distinguish between them. Well, so for example, you reminded me. You didn't remind me, but I am reminded as I listened to you of a, of a letter that I received from Harvard University not too long ago in which Harvard said to me, we figured out how to deal with the mess of education in the press and so on and so forth. And you will find in the attached a report from, I don't know how many, I didn't count them, 30 or 40 dons, deans of departments who are all agreeing with this. And they said now before we tell you what we're going to do, it said, we need to tell you what the purpose of the university is. And I thought, okay. And so I then go on to read the purpose of the university is the pursuit of truth. And I thought to myself, and I wrote a letter to them saying you apparently haven't been paying attention to the, the progress of Donald Trump in his pursuit of the political leadership of this country. Truth is something that doesn't belong in that statement that you've just done. Now, the university. This is the third or fourth time that I've written such a thing to the university. You will not be surprised to hear that the university did not reply to me, even though I am a former student of the university. I said in my note back, I want to see that the university thinks its purpose has to do with care of human beings and the planet, not the pursuit of truth. Because the pursuit of truth at this moment is the pursuit of an argument. It's the preparation for a fight because we are people who don't know the difference between assessments and assertions. So then I celebrate the mood of your comment, but it worries me that it doesn't begin to settle how we separate out the different pieces of.

Was always a moving target, and I regret the use of the term target, but it's a moving Truth is a movable feast. And science is organized or organizes itself around testing reality and being able to make predictions reliably. And some people really get stuck along that path and become unable to actually do science.

And I would say that and I would call to my side Jane Byrd when I say an allopathic medicine is one of the places where a lot of people are confused right now.

Indeed. And it calls to mind Gregory Basins. See, is this an assertion that humanity's troubles, humanity's challenge is in the difference between the way nature works and the way human beings think.

It's an assessment anyway. Thank you.

An assessment because it's not provable. Not to diminish what an assessment is, because we all make assessments. We can't not make assessments. It's not a judgment against that, but a call to distinguish where we are in the conversation.

Right.

Assessments can be highly influential.

They are highly influential.

They're one of the ways we live as beings in this world.

Right.

Can't live without them. But as Chauncey said, confusing them is a place of danger. Jane, Chauncey, thank you. Let's go to Alan and then to George. And I invite the rest of you, if you'd like to speak, especially if you haven't spoken here before, please add your yellow hand.

I'll raise my hand in case you haven't seen it.

I see it. No, it lines you up. It lines you up in order to go ahead, Alan.

I've been following this as best I can. When the nine principles were put out there, I went along with one through eight. All that. Yeah, that's. We are the creative beings and with great potential. Number nine, design is a bridge to the future. Now, that really stuck with me because I think, and as a woodworker and some of you know, I have been involved in the design. What is the shape of the table on which to make peace in the world? That is the future we see. And the design of that table is critical to how we actually are able to move from this place of what is racism, militarism, nationalism, materialism, up to the circle of community and commons. That is what could be. And this table, designed on the design from the Chinese book of change, receptive. Receptive to all outstanding questions, makes a beautiful image of how we can begin to focus on what are the outstanding questions that we must bring to our common table of consciousness to move from the system of war and domination to the system of peace and caring and sharing and helping and especially healing from this time of war and domination and constriction and enclosure of the commons. The design helps liberate consciousness. So I was really struck with that. And I think that the art and the beauty of design can actually help us see beyond where we are into the possibilities that are uncoverable in all our understandings. Anyhow, I put that forward. This is the hexagram of the receptive. It envisions Earth as a square, what is, and heaven as they circle, what is to be. And in the cycle of change, what is becomes what is to be. Earth becomes heaven, war becomes peace, and the square becomes a circle with nothing lost. That is, the change is a change in relation of the parts not of exclusion, negation, rejection or denial. That's a very positive image and put into art, might help us actually see in all our kitchen tables and schools and at the peace table that humanity needs the design perhaps to make a bridge hard enough to hold all of us across the dark waters below. Anyhow, that's what number nine came to me. I thought I would just put it in the pot. Thank you, Alan.

Thank you. In my youth, I trained in three kinds of carpenter, ending with with cabinet making. And that has a whole lot to do with how I think of the world. And I have recently been introduced to a book called Times Echo, which talks about music and the same kind of concerns that you're describing. I recommend Times Echo as a book that, that is talking about how we human beings have been struggling with the questions that you're bringing for a long time. Thank you for the comment.

Before I go to you, let me just add something, Alan. It's a beautiful offering. I really appreciate it. And it reminds me that design is always a conversation about what we care about. We're designing in relation to something that we want and what we care about shapes the design. And Chauncey, to your comment back at the top about my use of the word sustainability. For me, sustainability is always a conversation about design.

Yes. Thank you.

George Mokrae, thank you for being patient. And Manuel, you're next.

Jane brought up the word truth and Ken has been talking about the problematic idea of truth.

That's why I raised my hand.

Truth is one of the words I'm trying to eliminate from my vocabulary because I say it's too hard for me to get my arms around too big. And it depends upon your perspective. Right. So what I know coming back to the conversation is a carpenter's truth. If it's straight, level and plum, then it's true.

But in the world of politics, in.

The world of society, it's very hard to find something that fits that definition. Especially since our perspectives change so often. You know, we think something is real or true or accurate because we're looking at it from one direction and somebody else looking from another direction. Is it entirely differently and it's real and true and accurate from them, from where they're standing. So how do you get to that? Which is why I try not to.

Use that dangerous word truth.

Well, you just made a non dangerous version of it. You made an assertion version of true. It's a gorgeous, it's a gorgeous little poem.

You just did that distinction. The carpenter's true has A point of reference against which something can be tested. My version of true, or David Schoenbrunn's version of true, different than mine, don't have a reference point. They're a conversation from which something emerges or doesn't. And it's worth knowing where we stand in those. George, beautiful. Thank you so much. Manuel, welcome.

Thank you.

Gil.

Chauncey, thank you and good to see you. I enjoy listening to you. And I have two comments and maybe one question. First of all, your reminding about assertions and assessments, critical distinctions, reminded me of a book that I've been reading by the Club of Rome called Earth for All. Yes, A Survival Guide for Humanity. And one of the statements they make in this book is that one of the key problems in dealing with the world problems, so we do not distinguish between facts and fiction. And I made a little note saying assertions and assessments. So I just wanted you to point to. They see that as a big problem for solving the world's problem, not being able to distinguish that. So I think this knowledge of the difference between assertions and assessments could be extremely useful.

Very nice, Manuel. I was going to say fiction is assessments with a twist because on the other side of fiction would be I don't know what. But the point is the word fiction is intended to do damage to the, to. To whatever is being spoken in the, in the space of the fiction. And there are, there are perplexing things that are good that are assessments like crazy. So yeah, the, the book by Austin that's accessible. There's a book called how to Do Things with Words. It's a little book. It's a report of his speeches, his talks at Harvard after long, not long before he died. John Langshaw, Austin, how to Do Things with Words. And it's worthwhile for everybody who's been in this group to know about. It's quite important book.

Thank you. Thank you, John. So my other comment quickly here would be when we look at the discourse about climate change, for example, so there was the talk about politics of left right, blah, blah, blah. But if you look at the discourse of climate change, there are facts, there are certain assertions that are scientifically out there and there are people who say those are not facts. So just wanted to bring that up. If you have any comment about climate change from your perspective of assertions and assessments.

With blinding speed. Manuel just dug a little hole that I could fall into. So don't.

I'm not trying to.

I'm not in any way upset or unsettled or unhappy with what you just said, I think that. I'm a great admirer of, of an Australian gentleman whose name I forget at this moment. Someone here will know who he is who talks about. The current center of the argument about climate change being carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide being the least important part of what's going on with the climate right now. And I think that it's a long time. We're very early in the conversation of the climate, and it's going to be a long time before we begin to be confident about which are the assessments and which are the assertions. But. But what the gentleman that I'm talking about that I'm referring to says is that we should remember that the Hanging gardens of Babylon were once a place of lush climate, and Babylon is now sand and dirt and dust. And we've been making the planet less lush for a very long time in a variety of ways, much of it coming from the way we do agriculture and take care of forests. And it's certainly a domain in which I think we have a lot to learn. And it's enormously worthwhile and refreshing to. To spend time in the question that you are asking about. Manuel.

Thank you, Chauncey. And my last point, Gil, if I may, with just one more minute, let me just add.

Manuel, the person Chauncey's talking about is Walter Yenny. I've put his name in the chat.

Yes, thank you.

Further into that, thank you, Jones.

Chauncey, just want to highlight your principle number nine from your book that I have here in front of me here, which I think is extremely relevant. Point number nine, when he says design is what we call building the bridges to the future. So you've been very successful in your career working with leaders and building bridges for organizations, et cetera, et cetera. So one thing it would be for me, this is extremely important for the work of leadership today to know these principles and also the seven skill sets that you recommend for leadership in this book. So I recommend this book, but then bringing it to a personal level, what would you say is that future, here you are in your golden years. What is that future that you would like to bring forth for humanity?

Yeah. Well, I think that the. I love the question, and I know that many of those of you who are here have been asking and answering that very question here. And this, in the space that, that Gil and Ken invite us into, is a place for talking about that I have concluded for myself that we need to learn more about the basics of conversation, about how to have conversations with each other. Successfully before we're going to do a much better job on question questions like the climate we are. I remember clearly the moment when I watched Fernando Flores on a stage talking to several hundred people and he said we are communicatively incompetent. And I have noticed as the years have passed that each time we tackle a new question we have to go back and learn how to talk with each other again. I think that the subject of how to have conversations that are effective and caring and transformative for all the participants is the question that I'm going to spend my rest of my years in the center that'll be in the center of my world for the rest of my time here on the planet.

Thank you, Jones. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you both for that. Marc Antoine next and then Andy and we probably have time for one more if anybody would care to raise your hand.

Take it away, Antoine here. I really like your last point. We're all we need to communicate better. And the question of. I'm reminded of Lakoff's frame lab, right, working on what are the metaphors and the stories we spoke about, stories that we use to gather around and yet we had this earlier conversation about truth and that's what got me to raise my hand, right? There's truth is very hard to find but falsehoods can actually be identified quite well. I mean that's the Popperian frame of science. You can disprove things and some things are clearly false. And the whole question of, you know, trying to compromise and meet it's. I think it's very possible for criteria and values and values are what. I think it's similar to what you called assessments because those are, you know, it's about, yeah, it's about what you want and that's vaguely personal, vaguely cultural and versus issues of fact, predictions and so on where we can constrain the predictions with facts if we're willing to listen to the empirical background rather than the more deleterious fictions. I think fictions can be wonderful to help one another understand a very different point of view. Sometimes they're a way to tell the story across, but they're also a way to stop the reasoning. And that's everything is two faced here. And the, I think distinguishing issues of values and issues of facts are really important. But then there's also the question that some values do boil down to issues of fact. Like right now the big question about diversity versus what I'd call monoculture from my standpoint, I mean there are facts about Diverse teams being more successful. I don't know how well spread that knowledge is. It's certainly well established. The values and facts do have interesting intersections.

Marc Antoine, I don't know. Have you ever encountered a little book called On Bullshit? You know, the book, it's a wonderful little tiny piece of philosophy that I'm very fond of. And I think that part of what it is that you're talking about. Frankfurter did a very good job in that book of pointing to what you're talking about. And I'm an old fan of authors who, in fiction have shown us interesting interpretations about how we've gotten into the messes that we're in and have pointed to possible ways to escape from that. These are. When I say that I am deeply interested in language, I didn't pay any attention to how immersed in language I was before I met Fernando Flores. He then woke me up to just how much I was immersed in it and invited me to get serious about it. And getting serious about it has not meant that I understand, means that I'm respectful of what happens with us with language, deeply respectful. And. And I think. We're. That paying attention to the kinds of things that you're talking about is a very, very worthwhile thing to do. And I thank you for your comment.

Thank you.

Thank you, Andy.

Yeah, so I'm going to kind of piggyback on some of the previous.

Let me just ask the three of you who are queued up, Andy, Philip, and Daniel, in the interest of time, be succinct.

Okay.

So one of the things that I think we are undervaluing is how we receive information today versus we received information in a previous generation. And I think we are underestimating the amount of influence our daily algorithms and networks of information are and how it influences us. And what it does is it uses language so that you can automatically disregard something if it doesn't fit your. Let's say your bias. And we do this every day. And one of the. I was just on a call where they talked about how ESG marketing and materials target conservatives at less than 1% of the time. And so therefore, the conservatives don't have exposure to the language and the definitions. And so when they see that information, it creates a red flag and they immediately shut off processing that information. And so I think one of the difficulties that we have to navigate is people today get informations through different ways, and we need to use common languages that address their values, but also don't send up their defense mechanisms. And that is a really Difficult piece that's there. And I have it personal experience of basically trying to convert waste streams into a coal product and then using coal technology, I ostracize. When I say coal, a lot of my progressive friends and network, but for my conservatives, they understand, hey, that means it's actually achievable because this stuff exists in the real world today versus a, you know, progressive fever dream. But you always have to balance the communications based off of what other people are receiving information and how they're being influenced by basically our system that we have very little control over these days.

Andy, I think what you just said is extremely important and sensible to.

A.

Lot of a large proportion of the people who should be listening here. I want to invite you to think about one thing that a long time ago I began to excise the word information from my vocabulary because information is a way of talking about. We don't know what it is that's there. It's some kind of data that is floating around that we're calling information. And at one point I coined a phrase compu. Morphizing for. For talking about what human beings doing with. Do with each other when we're acting like we're computers dealing with computers. And the reason I comment on it is because the word information too often takes us away from the affective dimensions of the human being talking. Human beings talking to each other. You have a deep concern for people being swept away in moods and emotions. You personally have that as you're talking about this. But those. That kind of expression doesn't fit well with the idea of information being passed from personal. And in fact, we don't pass information from person to person. Your mood, your mood is much louder than any of the words that you used. And your mood has a certain beauty to it. Your personal mood, Andy, has a certain beauty to it that doesn't communicate with the word information. And I'm doing this as I hope it arrives as an invitation to test something and play with it and see what you see. Thank you very much for the comment.

Thanks, Andy. We'll go to Philip and then Daniel and then we'll wrap.

Yeah.

I just wanted to offer. For most of my adult life, I've really been trying to embrace the attitude that everyone is right about everything all of the time. And by everyone, what I mean are those people who are relevant to me as people I may be trying to cooperate with.

I'm about to go over to the.

Library and someone's Allan needs to mute.

I come to this attitude, I suppose, because the Way I was raised in the way many of us, you know, we. We take ourselves as a species very seriously. As knowers, Homo sapiens.

We reward.

In academics, you're rewarded for coming to know things that your peers don't know. The people who know the most get the highest scores. The people who have the best grasp on truth are elevated. And this was a very important part of my personality growing up. I always wanted to be the best. I always wanted to be the smartest. And I pursued activities focused on having the greatest understanding of the truth of reality, whatever. I studied philosophy. I interested in literally anything that I could possibly look at to get a better understanding of reality and the truth. And the consequence of that, finally, was isolation. It's not been incredibly helpful to me to be more knowledgeable than you. If we're trying to cooperate. If we're trying to cooperate, the real question is, what can I learn from you that can help us get to our shared goals together? And in that moment, I need to simply operate as if your perspective is the truth. It's different from mine. Mine is also true. We tend to talk when we find that our perspectives do not obviously lead to the same coordinated behavior. When people are in sync and the behavior that drives the coordination is evident, you just act and it happens, and it's good. Then we stop and compare notes. And in the process of comparing notes, the question is, am I trying to assess you as a knower, or am I trying to work with you as a cooperator? And if I'm trying to work with you as a cooperator, I find it a lot more helpful to simply operate on the rule that, in fact, you are right. When I. When you communicate with me and I don't understand, my understanding is limited. There's work I need to do to grasp what it is about your perspective that you're sharing with me that is integral to the cooperation we're trying to do. And I kind of think, you know, it's. It's hard to structure a competitive society around these things. It's hard to have any sort of illusion of a meritocracy or anything like this based on this. But finally, it seems like the only way I've managed to actually get anything done with anyone other than just make them feel stupid or myself. So just wanted to offer that.

Thank you, Philip.

Thank you for the offer, Philip. Daniel?

Yeah, I just wanted to add, it feels like we've been talking a lot about language as words, and it just made me think of two things. Margaret Mead's quote that what people say.

What they do, and what they say.

They do are three different things. And then also the, you know, I can't hear what you say because what you do, who you are, is too loud. Yeah. Or what you do. I guess there are different versions, but. But, yeah, and so there's.

We've been talking about language and Chauncey's version of that a moment ago, Daniel, when he said to Andy that your mood is speaking louder than your words.

Yeah. Anyway, I just.

Same thing. Go ahead. Sorry.

It just made me think of that as. Because there's, you know, language is many things, not just the words.

Yes.

And I wanted to get reflections on that or whatever was the right thing to do.

Thanks, Daniel.

Lovely. Lovely. And I'm sorry I had not said more in that direction, but absolutely.

Well, Chauncey, this is your opportunity to say one more thing before we wrap up.

I. I send love and affection and best wishes to everybody.

Thanks for being with us. Ken, any thoughts?

Oh, way too many to try and cram into two minutes here. I will say something that. That was revelatory to me. Some 30 odd years ago, I had some downtime. I was volunteering at Spirit Rock and there was a conference of Western Dharma teachers, so about 200 people who were born in the west but were teaching the Dharma around the world. And Michael Mead was a keynote speaker. And it's really hot August night, and we're all crammed in this little meditation hall and he comes out and he said, what's the greatest challenge facing humanity today? In this long silence, people sort of say, well, nuclear war, nuclear winter toxicity, toxic waste, loss of habitat. And it kept building and building and it got heavier and heavier and heavier and people were getting very depressed. And Mead said, you know, those are all really important challenges, but they're all secondary. Because the primary challenge confronting humanity is for people, especially men, to sit in the same room with other people, especially other men with whom they disagree and not resort to violence, or to leave the conversation when they don't like what's going on. And that was the moment in my life where I decided I am going to devote myself to learning how to design conversations to bring people together who have differences of opinion, where they can appreciate each other, where they can come to find ways of being will allow them to move forward together as opposed to in. To tear each other down. So it feels like we've been sort of dancing around that today, and I just want to throw that out there for whatever it's worth. Thank you very much.

We've been dancing beautifully. And one thing notable to me, I've sort of. I've been watching the participants list as we've gone, and usually in these calls, the attendance falls off as the call goes on. This time, we've stayed steady. Everybody has stayed in the room. So clearly something is important and valuable in connecting with many of the people here. And I appreciate your expression of your interest in that way. Even those of you who haven't spoken, spoken. There's a lot more here. Obviously, we can go on for longer. I will note that what we've talked about here is that the heart, obviously, of Chauncey's work also figures very strongly in Ken's work and my work as coaches and consultants. One thing that strikes me about this conversation, you know, Chauncey, you talked about the basics of conversation that we get so wrong. And as I think about it, that's the conversations we have with others and also the conversations we have with ourselves. I was on a call this morning where people were talking about saving the world, and I'm struck at the challenge that we have, that we create worlds in our words all the time, in the conversations with each other and with ourselves. So with that, I want to thank you for being here with us today. Today, this is our reminder that even in times like these.