Tag: contemplative-mind

Complexity, Computing, Contemplation, Learning?

Beyond conscious rationality

All of my work has been around harnessing the digital world to get us to go beyond the surface and think more deeply. Up till now this has been largely focused on rational modes of thinking, inquiry and sensemaking — hence all the stuff on argumentation, dialogue/debate mapping and hypermedia.

However, we are more than rational beings, and we know an increasing amount about the central role of the unconscious in dealing creatively with complex dilemmas that seem not to yield to conscious effort. I’ve touched on this a bit but it’s certainly been second fiddle adding harmonies to the primary melody. For instance, having been profoundly impressed, and moved, by Adam Kahane’s conflict resolution work (Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities), I concluded a 2008 chapter (Knowledge Cartography for Controversies: The Iraq Debate) as follows:

Finally, while we are certainly interested in improving information management, sharpening critical thinking and promoting sound argumentation, at the same time, these are only part of the story if knowledge mapping tools are to go beyond fostering critical analysis (albeit a worthy end in its own right), and provide support for shaping, not just analysing, the hardest kinds of policy deliberations. Those who are engaged in conflict resolution in the most strife-ridden communities and countries (not to mention the less extreme dynamics within our organisations), remind us that the key to making true progress is to establish the context for open dialogue in which stakeholders learn to listen to each other properly, and co- construct new realities (Isaacs, 1999; Kahane, 2004).

Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together. Doubleday: New York
Kahane, A. (2004). Solving Tough Problems. Berrett-Koehler: San Francisco

However, this was still focused on dialogue, albeit the deeper listening aspects so important in reconciliation, rather than the critical thinking/rational discourse I had focused on. But 2008 was clearly something of a watershed for me, since I also began to think about bringing in research on completely different modes of being and engagement — namely the contemplative and the spiritual — and wrote a series of posts on the intersection of learning, creativity, computing — and critically — the contemplative mind.

A lot has happened in the intervening years, and sparked by some recent tweets and ensuing links around sensemaking and complexity, I’ve been drawn back to this work, and can sense a new matrix of connections beckoning.

The drivers

We are confronting unprecedented turbulence and upheaval in formerly established, stable sectors of society, driven by a whole perfect storm of factors. For instance, Deloitte’s Shift Index is one set of strategic analytics on the impact of the new digital infrastructure and associated innovation economy on US business, leading the authors to the conclusion that knowledge flows and social learning are now the factors of first order importance, themes eloquently developed by John Seely Brown and colleagues in The Power of Pull and A New Culture of Learning. Here’s a fragment of argument map I used in a talk to interpret some of their case:

Power of Pull: Argument Map

Moreover, depending on who else you read, our times are also afflicted by political, intellectual, environmental and existential crises… [did I miss one?]

Learning Power

Meanwhile, since the 2008 blog posts, as both a researcher and chair of school governors, I have been engaging firstly with the work of Guy Claxton [see my blog posts], and then increasingly with this network’s co-founder, Ruth Deakin Crick [blog posts], both of whom developed tools based on the original Learning Power project they ran. This has been hugely productive, enabling me to see how the capacities which are so clearly needed for the 21st century can, through good teacher development, be fostered in young people (including my own children), and in adults.

Complexity and organisations

In a second strand, I’ve gained much from the work of Dave Snowden, who has been on a fascinating journey from “knowledge management” in IBM, to making progress with the Cynefin framework and Cognitive Edge services in turning the emerging science of complexity into practical tools to help our institutions address these new challenges.

Complexity science, organisational learning, learning-to-learn, and ecological resilience thinking, has started to come together in talks such as this, and this.

Facilitator/practitioner experience

A third strand of work has been the doctoral research by Al Selvin, who has been developing an empirically grounded framework which gives voice to the experience of expert practitioners using participatory, visual media (especially hypermedia) to scaffold real-time team sensemaking. Al’s work brings together many of conceptual strands that have long intruiged me – and some new ones outside my experience – in a powerful new configuration: sensemaking, narrative, aesthetics, ethics, and improvisation.

Contemplative computing

And so we come to contemplative computing. It’s a phrase I’ve used informally in a few conversations, and associated with the line of work described by David Levy, blogged earlier:

David M. Levy, “To Grow in Wisdom: Vannevar Bush, Information Overload, and the Life of Leisure” Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Libraries, (New York: ACM, 2005), 281-286.
David M. Levy, “Information, silence, and sanctuary“, Ethics and Information Technology, 9 (2007), 233–236.
David M. Levy, “No time to think: Reflections on information technology and contemplative scholarship“, Ethics and Information Technology, 9 (2007), 237–249.

But it wasn’t until last week that I came across Alex Pang, who’s published a draft paper on the topic following a sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I spent the weekend building wardrobes and listening to it read to me from my laptop by a speech-to-text tool, which (apart from reminding me of what  machines don’t do well…) gave me an initial feel for what he’s doing, and some time to contemplate it while doing something manual (!).

From the introduction:

“Contemplation offers a variety of benefits. A contemplative stance can help people be more creative; deal with complex problems that require months or years to solve; and is essential to long-term happiness. Contemplation promotes both self-sufficiency and close, questioning observation of the world, and both are particularly valuable in this moment in the history of technology.”

This was a hugely enjoyable read. What if we were able to teach our children and ourselves:

“…to recognize the psychic value of disciplined attention, of learning how to set aside the self when facing challenges, and to know how to be focused and in the moment.” (p.9)

Section 2, where Pang defines his terms, is short enough to reproduce:

“2. On Contemplation

Contemplation is an ancient word describing a vast set of practices for deepening one’s spiritual awareness, connecting with the divine, or reaching enlightenment, that have been refined over thousands of years. While I believe we can draw on that tradition, it’s also necessary to abstract and simplify it. Here, I define contemplation to be a form of detached, calm engagement. Each of these terms has layers worth exploring.

By detached I mean an effort to see without preconditions. Detachment allows one to avoid being surprised by novelty, to be blindsided, or to miss unexpected events because of limits caused by over-reliance on familiar routines and perspective. [Langer and Moldoveau, 2000] Detachment also allows a person to observe themselves, to evaluate their reactions to a situation in real time, and to more quickly and purposefully alter those reactions: to ignore hunger or pain or suspend judgment, for example. By calm I mean the ability of users to mobilize their skill and self-control, to avoid excitement, and thus maintain detachment and engagement. Engagement is the ability to focus attention on a subject, to keep the mind from wandering off on its own. It also requires paying attention to yourself. If the external world or your task is the center of your attention, your own senses and reactions are at the periphery: you monitor and observe them in order to be aware of their influence, not because there are worth your attention on their own.

One might think that detachment and engagement are opposites, but they are not. Detachment of one’s emotions or ego doesn’t prevent immersion in the moment; it’s a precondition for it. As Mihaly Csikszentmihaly puts it, “The absence of the self from consciousness does not mean that a person in flow has given up the control of his psychic energy, or that she is unaware of what happens in her body or in her mind. In fact the opposite is true,‖ he says. The loss of self-consciousness ―does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self…. When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are.” [Csikszentmihaly 1991, 64]”

Pang goes on to make the case that far from being a solo phenomenon locked in the mind, “contemplation” is skillful, embodied, solitary and social, and spatial. He then proposes a number of design principles (see below), which I’m still processing.

Given my 2008 brush with these ideas, it’s exciting to see this line of work unfolding, and it sparks the following set of questions, to which I currently have fragmented possible responses.

We know that contemplation, or the contemplative mind/stance, can help us think and learn more deeply. How do we design technology to augment this?

  • Pang puts forward some design principles:
    • Build awareness through DIY and self-experimentation
    • Recognize that we are cyborgs, and humans
    • Create rewarding challenges
    • Support mind-wandering
    • Treat flow as a means, not an end
  • On the last one in particular, he critiques game designers who have excelled at creating “flow” experiences as their own end, rather than Csikszentmihaly’s intention:

“as a means to a larger end — a more contemplative attitude, a deeper engagement with work, a better life — not as an end in itself.”

  • I don’t yet have any generic design principles to suggest, but am drawn — doubtless shaped by my previous work — to the importance of connection, and sparking associations that might not otherwise have been made. Work with Clara Mancini on Cognitive Coherence Relations theory and hypermedia may be a source to return to here, since it deals with fundamental, almost primitive associative building blocks that we seem to use as humans, such as co-occurrence and causality [1,2].

Does the contemplative mind have something distinctive to offer particularly with respect to making sense of complex dilemmas and systems? (in contrast to ‘merely’ complicated problems)

  • Complex systems defy our rational capacities to grasp in their entirety, but could it be that our unconscious minds, nurtured through the disciplines of contemplation, and augmented through technology (e.g. visualization and network science) holds a key? Can contemplative computing serve as a way of expanding one’s sense of the bigger picture, seeing new connections and patterns?
  • Much of my work inspired by the challenges of Rittel’s wicked problems has explored computer-supported discourse and visualization as one approach, but requiring users to make their thinking explicit and visible as these approaches do, this does not seem in the same vein as contemplation.
  • In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas & John Seely Brown draw attention to play, questioning and imagination as keys to a new culture of learning capable of coping with unprecedented complexity. It feels like these have important relationships to contemplation, sharing an emphasis on mindset, letting go, being in the flow, exploring and querying possible worlds, and non-verbal modalities…

How does narrative relate to contemplation? Are they cousins?

  • Snowden, Weick, Gabriel, Orr and many others place significant emphasis on narrative as a distinctive and important way of knowing, particularly in complex, turbulent times. Browning & Boudès provide an interesting synthesis of Karl Weick’s and Dave Snowden’s work on managing complexity, with respect to narrative.
  • My student Joanna Kwiat reviewed the literature on narratological models, and why story is a powerful mode of professional knowledge-sharing.
  • Pang points to the narratives that digital media lead us to construct about ourselves.

What is the relationship between Learning Power, the unconscious, and the contemplative mind?

  • There are already some good answers to this, since Claxton has thought extensively about both
  • Two of the Learning Power dimensions in Ruth Deakin Crick’s ELLI tool highlight creativity and strategic awareness. I’ve already discussed how the dimension of resilience connects to the dynamics of creativity and inhabiting the discomfort of liminal space.

How can contemplative computing promote mindful presence and selfless attention to the task in hand?

  • This was the focus of Al Selvin’s research (see above) who reviews the extensive research into the professional practices of those for whom this is crucial, such as facilitators/conflict resolution, and other forms of professional practice.
  • Pang reviews some literature on professions bring contemplation into their practices, but I don’t know whether anyone else has answered this question with respect to contemplative computing.

Is there an important relationship between contemplation, computing, and the new kinds of pedagogies and curricula needed for today?

  • Again, I have poorly developed thoughts on this. I found Helen Jelfs‘ doctoral research with Ruth one stimulating source, which reviews the shift in worldviews we have witnessed though classical, modern, postmodern and now relational — shifts which may come to be reflected our educational paradigms.
  • Another line of inquiry is to go back to one of the distinctive features of contemplative practices from all of the major traditions: that one comes to a truer sense of oneself, and one’s relationship with “the bigger picture” — however you choose to name this. So, this is pointing to the construction of narrative about one’s identity, which Ruth Deakin Crick has argued sits at the heart of authentic, deep learning which connects with our life stories. Contemplative Computing in action should, arguably, foster such qualities.

I hope that I’ll make some progress on these issues with the very eclectic and expansive thinkers who make up the new Learning Emergence network, but feedback very much welcomed on these nascent thoughts from anyone who comes across this. One thing I do know is that others will have thought longer and more deeply on this — let’s connect…

Complexity, Computing, Contemplation, Learning?

Just posted on the new Learning Emergence network blog, a set of reflections on how we may need to bring in a whole new mindset if we are to truly tackle the complexities now confronting us…

“All of my work has been around harnessing the digital world to get us to go beyond the surface and think more deeply. Up till now this has been largely focused on rational modes of thinking, inquiry and sensemaking — hence all the stuff on argumentation, dialogue/debate mapping and hypermedia.

However, we are more than rational beings, and we know an increasing amount about the central role of the unconscious in dealing creatively with complex dilemmas that seem not to yield to conscious effort. I’ve touched on this a bit but it’s certainly been second fiddle adding harmonies to the primary melody.”

[…]

“2008 was clearly something of a watershed for me, since I also began to think about bringing in research on completely different modes of being and engagement — namely the contemplative and the spiritual — and wrote a series of posts on the intersection of learning, creativity, computing — and critically — the contemplative mind.A lot has happened in the intervening years, and sparked by some recent tweets and ensuing links around sensemaking and complexity, I’ve been drawn back to this work, and can sense a new matrix of connections beckoning.”

Richard Rohr: Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

In June last year, at a conference in York, Richard Rohr (Franciscan priest) presented what was for me a new twist on the abiding themes of his work on combining the contemplative stance in Christian spirituality, with social action for peace and justice.

It was electrifying for me to sit there as a researcher in e-learning, sensemaking, knowledge management and dialogue/argumentation, and hear him over 3 days consider some of the implications of what he referred to “stages of consciousness” presented in the familiar (in my field) language of information, knowledge and wisdom (though most researchers are a little more circumspect about throwing the latter term around, because we’ve lost language in that department — which is part of the missing piece that Rohr helps plug I think). When someone forges links between passions in your life that you’ve struggled to join up, it’s a positive high.

Now, while “stages of consciousness” kind of language may put you off (and granted, you don’t often get that kind of talk in knowledge media…) don’t fret. I’m convinced there is material here that connects to the heart of what we’re trying to do in designing social, intellectual digital media that helps us integrate heart and head, moving from fragmentation to identity, chaos to meaning, and longing to belonging. Having pondered last June off and on for over a year now, my mission over the coming months is to try and unpack this single sheet of paper that’s been sitting on my doc reader by my LCD, as I see strands flowing into this from other work (see the previous, and other recent posts).

So, let’s see what Rohr says…

Stages of Consciousness

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

(handout distributed in York, UK, “On the Edge” conference, 1-3 June 2007)

1. INFORMATION STAGE

Where you have to start, but where most people stay. The gathering of data, facts, formulas, and information, yet always searching for the more correct information. Knowing parts and names for things. All you need are some good resources and a good memory, and some ability with detail. Technician stage. “My information is better than your information”, keeps you at a level of power struggle passing for intelligence.

2. KNOWLEDGE STAGE

When you begin to see patterns, and connect the bits of information into at least small wholes. The little engineer or scientist who can put things together at some level. Much needed, and many at least advance to this level.

3. ANALYTIC INTELLIGENCE

When you begin to see much bigger patterns and make bigger connections. A synthesizer or great scientist, who begins to work outside of the usual box. Often these are mistrusted or laughed at initially like Eistein, Bill Gates, or what appears to be the naivete of young saints and mystics. One can still be ego based and dualistic at this stage, however, and does not imply any integration with heart, ethics, God, or the transpersonal universe of meaning. NORMALLY EMPHASIZING FORMS TOO MUCH BECAUSE ONE HAS NOT YET EXPERIENCED THE FORMLESS. One is still “measuring” reality more than “meeting” it on its own terms. Both Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, however, differentiate between two different kinds of intelligence. This is the crossover point.

3.5 INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE

One begins to MEET reality instead of just measuring it. An initial feel for the whole, which requires at least one moment of unitive consciousness/authentic God experience. Non dual thinking begins, but still feared and mistrusted because it is outside of the box you have operated in up to now, and usually there are very few people who can guide you or tell you that you are not crazy. Head and heart are just starting to work together.

4. UNDERSTANDING

One begins to connect the smaller wholes into The Whole, a fully integral worldview. I begin to be part of the entire “great chain of being”, visible and invisible, inner and outer, form and formlessness, matter and spirit, which are seen as one. I begin to know things by connaturality, kinship, or affinity (contemplation) instead of merely mental analysis. Mini mysticism, where I begin to meet reality on its own terms, without a need to categorize it, control it, explain it, or even understand it. “It is what it is”.

5. WISDOM

Your mind is now your servant instead of your master. ALL PREVIOUS STAGES ARE INCLUDED, USED, AND HONOURED, but you transcend them all to non dual thinking as such. No need to divide the field for the sake of being right, being in control, or being perfect. All is allowed to teach you. Patient with paradox, mystery, and seeming contradictions. The contemplative stance as such.

6. TRANSFORMATION

Your consciousness actually takes on a new form, which if practiced, becomes your entire life program. The saint or enlightened one. Habitual non dual seeing.

Lots here I’ve yet to fathom. But already, so many resonances with the concerns of meaningful learning and sensemaking, with scaffolding authentic enquiry, fostering healthy work and social relationships, moving beyond stances to bolster one’s own security and power base, and engage in true dialogue. I’ll unpack some of my many scribbles on this page as I have time…

Calculating Mind, Contemplative Mind

There has been an interesting convergence of memes over the past few months. The focal question revolves around the potential role of software tools in helping us move towards a more open, mindful stance when working on problems that require creative insight. We can’t always get there through focused, rational analysis. So what would software do?

Writing as a priest about wisdom, Richard Rohr (e.g. in Everything Belongs) contrasts the difference between the calculating mind and the contemplative mind. Guy Claxton (e.g. in The Wayward Mind) writes about this in similar terms but focused on creativity and learning. Rohr speaks of the spirituality of subtraction, rather than of performance and accretion (see much western religion), and Claxton writes similarly. This is all about learning the habits of mind that can nurture the ability to think deeply and expansively, to see the big picture (to ‘colour outside the lines’ as Rohr nicely puts it), and to allow the unconscious to do its creative work as well, when we allow ourselves to follow hunches and disengage from working consciously on problems.

Then Jack Park sent me a link to this March lecture to Google by David Levy, entitled “No Time To Think”:

Levy kicks off by reminding us of the context in which Vannevar Bush, the father-figure of hypertext, was considering the need for better tools for thinking: how are we going to carve ourselves space to think deeply about the things that matter, when we already experience information overload and disciplinary specialization? (reminder: this is 1945, at the close of WWII!). Levy then introduces a new character (to me) — the German theologian Josef Pieper, who wrote in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, on our profound need for “leisure”, his word for the mental and emotional space to engage and experience the world as it is in all its richness, free of our preconceptions. Another way of speaking about the contemplative stance.

Levy concludes that the next big challenge for human-centred computing may be to rebalance the ancient concepts of ratio (searching, re-searching, abstracting, refining, concluding) with intellectus (thinking, reflection, assimilation, contemplation):

My quest for how these converge into meaningful patterns and a research agenda continues…

Resilience and Liminal Space

I’m trying to clarify how learning, sensemaking, emotions and spirituality interweave. It all happens in the same person, so we can’t chop them up.

Being in London for a few days at PCF5 has given me that little extra reading time I don’t normally find in the family home 🙂

So yesterday I had the luxury of browsing in the superb Institute of Education bookshop and picked up Guy Claxton’s Wise Up: Learning to Live the Learning Life which has been on the hitlist for a few months. Maybe his work could also add a new dimension to SocialLearn, an Open U. strategic initiative to explore emerging online paradigms for the new learning landscape…

Right from the introduction to this lucid and influential book, Claxton’s writing is engaging and to the point:

Let me be clear. Learning, in the way I am using the term, is what you do when you don’t know what to do. (p.11)

Claxton goes on to present, in accessible language for a non-academic, research in the learning sciences which motivates what turned into the Building Learning Power approach for school teachers to learn how to teach children an explicit language for learning-to-learn. It turns out this derives in turn from a research project at University of Bristol into what makes good learners:

Deakin Crick, R., Broadfoot, P. and Claxton, G. (2004). Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: The ELLI Project. Assessment in Education, 11, (3), pp. 247-272.

One of the key dimensions in Learning Power is resilience — the emotional capacity to tolerate the feelings of discomfort that assail us when we are stretched out of our comfort zone, threatening our sense of identity. Both adults and children flee this feeling if they are not resilient enough to persevere and believe that they can push through.

OK, now switch context to our AHRC/EPSRC/JISC-funded e-Dance research project, which as I hoped when putting it together with the others, is turning out to be an incredibly stimulating space to be in. We opened the proposal as follows:

A key problem in the academic field of dance is how to capture and document the incremental development of ideas and their material manifestation in the creative process within practice-led research. In improvisational, embodied investigation, the mode of engagement is generative, pre-verbal, intuitive, experiential and fluid. This militates against types of cognitive engagement necessary for analysis, critique and reflection. The problem is most acute in the context of dance: however it is pertinent to all arts-based disciplines. This project is predicated on dialogic processes between dance and e-Science and the fluidity of concepts as they transverse the two domains, making use of recent advances in the visualisation and representation of spatio-temporal structures and discourse.

Drilling down into the theme of pre-linguistic annotation/capture of choreographic design process, we wrote:

The visual nature of the interface employed by these e-Science documentation tools enables exploration of possibilities for pre-linguistic, multi-layered, non-linear representations of process, more aligned with the characteristics of the creative process itself. This reiteration of process will be considered not just as a static archival document of the process, but as a dynamic source of material that can be redeployed, for example, as a site for forensic, archaeological investigation; a score for further developmental commentaries generated through practice; or pre-recorded audio/visual content for re-use in hybrid distributed performance.

As the Open U. software development effort comes on stream in August, and with our Research Intensive in U. Bedford only a week or so away, we are now thinking about the kinds of user interface that choreographers want to scaffold, capture, provoke, reflect back their creative process. The role of the visual, and perhaps non-verbal human-computer interaction, are to the fore, as we take seriously the pre-linguistic nature of the choreographic design process. We have learnt from Helen and Sita (our choreographers) and from our partial immersion in the choreographic process, that they will ‘just know’ when they see something ‘right’ unfolding before them on the dance floor: a moment that they want to capture without getting verbal, to be revisited and replayed later for reflection and further rehearsal/research.

With these considerations in mind, it seemed providential when Guy Claxton emailed me this article:

Claxton, G. (2006). Thinking at the Edge. Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 351–362

This tries to put language and concepts on how we conceive, and nurture, creativity. His interest is in how we work with, not fear or fight, that creative period when things remain inchoate, ill-formed and unsettling:

…there is a softer, slower kind of groping for a way of articulating something that is currently, tantalizingly, beyond our linguistic grasp… It is these gentle, generic, but often unsung, aspects of the creative process that I want to describe.

Intruigingly he uses the particular example of choreographers, as he writes about:

…the intuitive feeling of rightness (or wrongness) that guides the process. This sense of rightness—the same immediate, unjustifiable feeling of ‘Yes, that’s it’ that guides the process of focusing—seems to be essential to the kind of creativity I am exploring. A choreographer may not know what it is she is looking for until she tries out one more move and gets the ‘Yes, that’s it’ response. As I write, I too do not know quite what I want to say, nor precisely where the discussion is heading, until a sentence hits the screen and I get the ‘Yes, that’s it’ feeling. Even research scientists must learn to recognize and trust that intuition.

Inspired by the 1960s work of Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago on the pre-conceptual period of creativity and cognitive change, and continued by his associates [Focusing Institute], Claxton writes:

Gendlin’s point is this: that the kind of personal problem-solving that happens in counseling and psychotherapy usually requires slow, delicate, hazy knowing, rather than quick, conceptual, conscious knowing. The main problem is often not one of ‘deciding what to do’, but of coming to understand more precisely what it is that makes things appear problematic to us in the particular way they do. And that kind of knowing requires us to be able to go ‘back to basics’; to start with the complicated, murky ‘felt sense’ of the predicament, and then slow down the process of epistemic evolution so we can (a) see more clearly what kinds of assumptions we might, unconsciously, have been stirring in to the conceptual mix; and (b) allow the emerging conceptualization to be driven, and continually refined, by the felt sense itself, rather than forcing it to fit the pre-existing templates, categories, habits and phrases that we happen to have installed in the skill-scape and the word-scape. Focusing enables people to regain some flexibility, with regard to their ‘ways of knowing’. In particular, it helps them relearn the kind of patient, open-minded attentiveness that allows them to conceptualize their predicament in a way that is fresher, more differentiated, and more accurate, in the sense of being closer to the complex reality of their own embodied knowing.

So, all this is quite intruiging. In the context of e-Dance, embodied, pre-verbal cognition looks to be an interesting seam to mine in the coming months as we seek to build language that bridges cognitive interface design and dance, and concretely, to adapt our visual hypermedia tools (Compendium and Cohere) to support the construction of resources for choreographic, practice-based research.

The final strand coming together is around the writing of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, on liminal space. Take this article, written in the aftermath of 9/11, but applicable to all contexts of suffering — which Rohr, uncomfortably, holds to be the only time when we grow spiritually:

“Limina” is the Latin word for threshold, the space betwixt and between.

[…] It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. It is no fun.

[…] IF YOU ARE NOT trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait — you will run — or more likely you will “explain.” Not necessarily a true explanation, but any explanation is better than scary liminal space. Anything to flee from this terrible “cloud of unknowing.” Those of a more fear-based nature will run back to the old explanations. Those who love risk or hate thought will often quickly construct a new explanation where they can feel special and again in control. Few of us know how to stay on the threshold. You just feel stupid there — and we are all trying to say something profound these days.

[…] THE PREFERRED LANGUAGE of both the Christian and the Muslim mystics is the language of darkness. They are most at home in the realm of not-knowing. Often, therefore, it was called “luminous darkness.”

This “cloud of unknowing” is Claxton’s “slower kind of groping for a way of articulating something…”, and Gendlin’s “felt sense of the predicament…” —  but this time it’s framed within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by a spiritual mentor who counsels normal people like you and me who may be enduring suffering and confronting personal meltdown as all the usual reference points dissolve.

As our times grow more complex and uncertain, nurturing resilience, which we might see as part of the deeper ability to inhabit liminal space, looks to be of central importance — not only for ourselves, but surely also our children. It may be “merely” artistic wrestling in the creative process, or the struggle to learn deeply, or it may be facing immense shock in one’s life.

As Dave Snowden argues, we are past the era of designing fail-safe organisational and societal systems: the only thing we can be confident of is that they will fail, as the environment grows more turbulent. We must instead design for safe-fail systems.

Since people are at the heart of such infrastructure, we might wonder what kind of an educational or organisational learning culture — from kindergarten on — would value the nurturing of such a fine mix of cognitive, emotional and social skills, dispositions and personal qualities? What if we treated them as equally important to — indeed, profoundly enabling of — traditional core literacies, or the performance indicators that conventionally govern the balance sheet?