Nora Bateson turned down a formal partnership because the contract's legal language killed the vitality and complexity her work needs. She chose human commitment over organizational structure, arguing that real collaboration should be regenerative, built on generosity rather than rigid deliverables.
Chapters
I think, you know, listening to you all, I, of course, you know, there's so much that's here and been said. And I just, I had this experience in the last couple days that was really revealing to me, and maybe there's something in this that can be useful, where I have been working with a group of people that I just absolutely adore, and they wanted to make a partnership. And so I said, oh yes, of course, let's do that. And then I got a document that was a contract for a partnership, and I read the document, and if I had read that document a month ago, it would have been read into a context in which the premises of the document, the legalities, the kind of sealing of all the back doors of what a partnership contract would have in it, that all of those things might have felt that they were somehow justified and reasonable and, you know, Of course, not maybe the way I would do it, but nevertheless something that would be normal. But getting that contract this week, I read it and I looked at all those paragraphs and thought, what is this? This is so last system. I have no use for this whatsoever because everything that I need to do right now exists in parallel to the system that's developing these documents. There's something so inherently out of relationship, out of complexity, out of what I would call the warm data, out of— there's nothing in that document that allows the vitality to take place. And so something has happened I mean, you know, I've been at this for a long time, as all of us have. So I'm also curious as to what new insights are coming to all of you, because I think if there's one thing that I'm really certain of right now, it's that our old scripts, no matter how good they were, are actually not as useful right now as we might have thought they would be. The way in which these trans-contextual changes are taking place are surprising, and I think that, that has been, that's been for me what brought me deep into this regenerative space of recognizing everything I want to do right now has to do with building relationships that build relationships, And the way that last system was set up was about building relationships that were separated from other relationships. So I'm not really interested in that first-order set of deliverables. It's more at the relationships that build relationships that build relationships level. It's like the soil, right? The apple core that's rotting in the soil that becomes the forest, and you're walking through the forest with a friend and you have an idea. Where'd the idea come from? And that piece of real complexity has been, you know, it's been strangled by so much, you know, just KPI nonsense and ways of even mapping or thinking about complex solutions that they were at an order that didn't really hold those relationships about relationships about relationships at the relationships level.
So how do you change, when you look at the contract, how do you change the system without removing the positive that previous generations have achieved through this ordered society? When you look at the contract.
Oh, are you talking to me?
Yes, yes, or anyone. What are the filters?
What I had to do was just actually talk to the people and say, my commitment is with you, not this organization. This is a human-to-human loyalty and commitment. I am willing to invest in your complexity, but I know this organization can't hold it. So I just sidestepped the whole thing and said, you know, who knows, you know, in 6 months, which of these organizations will be standing. So the relationships that I want to build right now are relationships with other complex living systems.
And not to the systems.
And not to the systems that were devitalizing those very same relationships, right? Everything in that contract was about systems hold back. It was about don't give what you're not willing to have taken from you. That's what basically the whole contract said. Nature doesn't work that way, right? That's systems holdback. It's, it's that thing of saying, I'm not going to give what I could give because I know you're not going to give what you could give, and you're not going to give what you could give because you know that I'm not going to give what I could give, and pretty soon we've devitalized the relationship, right? So how do we start to build into a new way of living something that is much more sourced through generosity and integrity.
