Ways to Sustain your Matrix Foundations Community

Example 1 - In cyber-community:
What is a PBwiki - a new Matrix Leadership Institute PBwiki for our Matrix communities is coming soon!

There are many ways that those of us who have completed a Foundations training stay connected over time and distance after our Foundations training is over. Many of these you know, e.g. the Witness/Apprentice process together with others from your training, enrolling in the Advanced Facilitators Training, using your phones and emails to stay connected.

One way we are currently exploring at Matrix Leadership Institute, because of its ease to assist connection in cyber-community, is via our own site done using the PBwiki technology. Currently, I am designing that Matrix Leadership Institute site. We hope you will stay tuned for new developments about this site!

In the spirit of my love for community, I am sharing info on PBwiki technology with you here at our blogspot. I think our site will have much to offer in the upcoming months and years to help sustain the Matrix community you joined, when you engaged in your Foundations training.

Here's some other things we will probably do with this site:

• It will be an easy set-up for various Foundations classes to add a page and do some commenting with each other on how the learning is going while in the process of the Foundations training.
  
• It is a way to put Matrix Leadership Institute projects onto one site for keeping notes and getting to easily by everyone on the project
  
• It has potential for our capacity and delivery of online training, e.g., a locus for syllabus/online class applications/etc.
  

I'm sure there are more, but here's some "general getting to know about" info for you about PBwikis:

“Make a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich”

A PBwiki is an easy-to-use web page that multiple people can edit. It really is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich! You may or may not know this but setting up a PBwiki is free and takes only 10 seconds.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Click on the links below...





Link to the new PBwiki tour


Create your own wiki at http://www.pbwiki.com


Link to the PBwiki Educator Videos

I'm excited about the possibilities for Matrix Leadership Institute communities! If you have any ideas how you would like to see the Matrix Leadership Institute's PBwiki site develop to support ongoing sustainability of your Matrix community, please post them here.

More later,
Joanne for Matrix Leadership Institute

Approaching a Paradigm Shift

Reflections on my introduction to systems theory, group dynamics and shifting the way I/we live.

“Seemingly a dramatic ideological transition is needed, comprising the transformation of our ways of thinking, our schemata, our paradigms, if we humans are to approach sustainability in our relations with one another, to say nothing of our interactions with the rest of the biosphere” (Gell-Mann, 1994, p. 359).

The balance in the world and within myself currently doesn’t represent the highest level of health. Symptoms of imbalance are everywhere: pollution, violence, corruption and depression. Seeing something as “wrong” is an old way of looking at the world where duality rules and there is little room for mystery or perfection in the natural way of things.

Yet I don’t want to be soothed, told that everything will be okay. I want real change, real action. “Systems cannot be understood by analysis. . . but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole” (Capra, 1996, p. 29). I want to know balance and the highest capacity of a system.

The possibility for wisdom, creativity and vitality is greater than the sum of a system’s parts. These emergent tendencies arise as a living system forms. Right now there is the possibility to step outside the cultural system, step outside habitual ways of being. Collectively wake up. I know the possibility, and I am still learning the action.

I can feel the edges of the paradigm (the underlying thinking which organizes a community); the feeling that the external ‘authority’ is making ‘us’ do things that ‘we’ don’t want to do. “The shift of paradigms requires an expansion not only of our perceptions and ways of thinking, but also of our values” (Capra, 1996, p. 9).

A new way of being in groups is only as close as we can live it moment by moment, day by day. This is both the hope and the fear as I see how often I react with my habitual patterns. “The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members’ awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform” (Flowers, Jaworski, Scharmer, & Senge, 2004, p. 32).

Right now I feel myself between the current system and the arrival of the next. . . I can feel the possibility of a living system forming, where our individuality is honored and the group supports these differences as strengths of the whole. This must be the beginnings of emergence (life arriving out of a collection).

When the ‘group field’ emerges, it has its own identity and tendencies. "You can only talk to the group at the speed of the communication between its members." (Knowlan, 2005) Which means the more connected we are, the faster the group can respond. Each member’s health is tied to the health of the whole.

I have felt myself taken over by the “group field” and begin to channel it more than once. I figure that this is a useable skill, if I could just learn to work with it more consciously. The most necessary task of overcoming a life of habitual distrust and internal control to fully bring myself to the group (and my life) feels like the hardest thing anyone could ask of me.

What I want is nothing less than a new way of being with emotion, with task, with people, with myself. Finding the place in between collapsing (repressing everything) and striking out (exploding). Health. So far, I am alternately flailing and swimming in working in this new way with moments of clarity. I am afraid. Luckily, the new paradigm includes room for learning, imperfection and growth.

“Group leadership is like dancing on a rocking boat where a great deal of the rocking is caused by your dancing” (Spivak, 2005). There is a paradox in the innate perfection of the world and myself while always being room for infinite improvement and learning.

References

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. New York: 1^st Anchor Books.

Flowers, B.S., Jaworski, J., Scharmer, C.O., & Senge, P. (2004). Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future. Cambridge, MA: The Society for Organizational Living.

Gell-Mann, M. (1994). The quark and the jaguar: adventures in the simple and the complex. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company

Knowlan, A. (2005) From a lecture at the Matrix Leadership Foundation Training, Boulder 2004-5.

Spivak, J. (2005) From a conversation at the Matrix Leadership Foundation Training, Boulder 2004-5.

Applications: How the Matrix Model Changes Groups and Lives

"This training will change your life. You will learn about yourself and others at levels you didn't know existed - to where a rich and sacred tapestry of human connection and differences holds the universe together. Even more importantly, you will learn the skills that enable you to carry this magic into the world."

- Eliott Cisneros,
Intercultural Competence Training & Mediation
Fort Collins, CO

Hey, it would be great for those of us brimming with impacts and applications of the matrix model to post and discuss it here. So one possibility is to answer this post to share how you are "carrying this magic into the world". Another, if you happen to be an author here, is to post your own discussion thread. Okay, blog away...