IONS Review #62 • December 2002

Co-Intelligence

A Vision for Social Activism

I was only one of many activists and would-be activists who dropped out of traditional political protest in frustration, or in search of more life-affirming approaches to building a better world. some of us went into community work, helping stakeholders come together or communities develop shared visions—or we joined the intentional-community movement.

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Some of us took up spiritual paths or explored some other aspects of the human potential movement and, from our own transformations, came to believe that social change required, above all, the transformation of individuals so that they could know themselves and the deeper realms of life more fully.

Some of us moved into the arts or became performers, sometimes taking our creations into the streets. Others found ways to make a difference through computer networking and programming, or in the organic and natural foods movements, or through various "green technologies" and environmental law, eco-philosophy, and green architecture and city planning.

Some of us went into organizational development or facilitation work, becoming consultants trying to shift corporate activity in more positive directions or to improve nonprofit effectiveness. Many became teachers, at all levels of education, or presented remarkable new ways and worldviews in workshops.

Many of these one-time activists evolved into core members of an important and rapidly growing subculture identified by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson as "cultural creatives" (www.culturalcreatives.org) who, they estimate, now make up about a quarter of the adult population in the United States. Their ecological, social, spiritual, and personal development concerns cause them to be in the forefront of cultural transformation.

Some of these aptly named cultural creatives developed the very ideas, methods, and organizations I've written about in my book The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All. I've learned a tremendous amount from them. They wanted to make a better world, and they've been creating better ways to do it for decades. My own view is that those cultural creatives who were activists—and I am among them—never actually left the world of activism. Rather, we changed it. Although there are thousands of adversarial activists still protesting and fighting, I don't believe activism is primarily adversarial any longer. More and more creative folks have found ways to make a significant difference in collaborative and holistic ways.

Their work has inspired me to come up with a new framework and language. I use the term "co-intelligence" to mean "the capacity to evoke creative responses and initiatives that integrate the diverse gifts of all for the benefit of all." But the fact is that co-intelligent activism was going on long before I came up with the term, and more of it happens every year.

At a very deep level, I believe that those of us who are beginning to build a more co-intelligent society—a global wisdom culture—are stepping into a totally different activist game. The former structures, all the experiments and methodologies, even the problems and catastrophes—everything—are resources for what we're beginning to do. But what we're beginning to do is different in kind from what we've done before, or thought we were doing before.

We're shifting from thinking of social change as an effort to solve problems and achieve an ideal society, to realizing that social change is an ongoing process that we can enhance and make wiser. Our goal is no longer a desired state for society but rather a desirable unfolding of society. In other words, we're not trying to engineer a new society to our specifications so much as trying to jump-start certain innovations that will (we hope) elicit society's conscious and continuous re-creation of itself as needed, to meet the challenges, changes, and opportunities it faces.

A Vision of a Co-Intelligent Wisdom Culture

The dream of co-intelligent activism is of a culture characterized by a high capacity for collective reflection that nurtures wise and diverse forms of self-organization in organizations, communities, and societies, as well as among diverse societies worldwide. If we lived in such a culture, we'd see:

• widespread respect for diversity in a context of well-understood common ground;
• many forms of high-quality dialogue, at all levels of society, especially political and governmental, that generate creative consensus or that compromise;
• organized feedback to enhance community health, vitality, insight, and sustainability;
• a spirit of partnership with each other and the world around us;
• leadership that persistently nurtures the capacities of individuals, groups, communities, and whole societies so they can better function in independent and interdependent ways, without top-down dependencies;
• people creating a good life together;
• a healthy integration of linear and non-linear ways of operating—of action and prayer, of intention and acceptance, of managerial and evocative approaches, of orderly security and creative chaos. This vision is based on a shift in perspective that begins with recognizing a simple fact: Together we create our communities, our societies, and our world. We're always doing this, no matter what we do or don't do. We can do this consciously, intentionally, and responsibly.

Conscious Social Evolution

Here are some questions that characteristically concern various activist movements when they confront a situation or a society:

"Are things fair and free? Is power decentralized—or at least constitutionally answerable to the people?" [traditional democracy].

"Is the environment respected? Is nature's wisdom followed in society's activities?" [ecological movements].

"How do these people (or nations) handle conflict? How much do they resort to violence?" [peace movements].

"Does everyone have enough? Who is oppressed? Who owns the means of production?" [socialism].

"Are people creative? Does this society support individual self-realization?" [human potential movement].

"Is this society compassionate? Is there due attention to consciousness? Do people behave mindfully?" [spiritual activism].

These are all very important questions. Co-intelligence-oriented activism addresses the context within which the above concerns are raised:

"Are people aware they are co-creating their shared world? Are they creating together consciously and wisely? What about their culture and their institutions helps them or hinders them in doing that?

"Does their culture nurture diversity and support positive interactions among diverse people and perspectives?

"Does it embrace change and challenge with elegant imagination, in creative partnership with the world, and using the diverse capacities of its people?"

Within this context, co-intelligent activism often encounters many issues central to more traditional movements. Oppression, concentration of power, the erosion of democracy, environmental degradation, violence, materialism, consumerism, and poor education, for example, all degrade a culture's ability to function co-intelligently. Thus the metaissue of co-intelligent activism embraces most social concerns, yet reaches beyond issue-focused activism into the realm of conscious social evolution.

Such activism is, of course, not easy. Efforts to rise above partisanship are difficult, and become more so in situations and systems that are set up to promote conflict. However, through the lens of co-intelligent activism, dialogue stands out as fundamental—a vital antidote to the ultimate futility and alienation of most win/lose processes. Therefore, as co-intelligent activists, we do what we can to build bridges to those we think of as "them."

This is a growing edge for many of us. It doesn't mean giving up our values, but rather creating a context where different values can be respected.

Given any condition we want to change, we can ask:

• What are we doing to co-create and sustain this problem—through our beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and systems?
• What do we want to co-create together?
• What beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, agreements, and systems would help us co-create what we want instead of what we don't want?
• What beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, agreements, and systems would help us ask and answer these questions together—and act on what we learn—most effectively?

Handling Issues Co-Intelligently

For some time, it is likely that most co-intelligent activism will focus on traditional issues, done co-intelligently. Much of this work will also help build a wise democracy. It might be useful to explore how we might approach certain traditional issues, trying to understand how different strategies could enhance or undermine co-intelligence.

Consider union activity: When unions fight for better wages, benefits, and working conditions, they can enhance co-intelligence when they counter the dominating power of large, irresponsible corporations and bring members of their community together in collaborative activity. But if they promote such adversarial relationships that win-win solutions become virtually impossible—or if they focus on the material prosperity of their members to the exclusion of other factors (including the effects their company has on other human and natural communities) —they can actually undermine co-intelligence. Interestingly, unions in Europe have focused more on sharing control of their companies than on wage demands, and, in the political arena, have managed to increase vacations and shorten work weeks, providing time for community and political life. This supports co-intelligence.

Consider minority groups who are fighting for educational curricula that honor their perspective and history: They tend to enhance co-intelligence when they nurture respect for diversity and uniqueness—their own and others—and ground their members in a meaningful cultural context, supporting the needs of people emerging from oppression. But they can undermine co-intelligence when they repress dissent and diversity (or promote conformity and group-think) within their group, or deny their common ground with other groups or with the larger human or natural communities in which they live.

Peacemakers in violence-torn communities serve co-intelligence when they help polarized people work through their differences to greater understanding, and when they teach people how to make creative use of conflict. This is especially true if they see (and help others see) that violence always has both personal and systemic causes that need to be understood and transformed. But peacemakers can undermine co-intelligence if they resolve conflicts by denying or suppressing differences.

It makes a difference if homeless services bring people together to help care for themselves, or simply sustain individual dependence on agencies and charity. It makes a difference if organizational-development consultants help those corporations whose activities and products respect and serve the world around them—or those that damage and degrade the people and environments they deal with. It makes a difference if protesters are pressuring powerholders to give in to their demands, or, rather, to engage with them as peers in genuine dialogue (as Gandhi did).

I have developed some broad guidelines to handle social issues co-intelligently. You can read about them in detail by visiting www.co-intelligence.org or in my book, The Tao of Democracy:

• Help issue-oriented activists and community groups function well and holistically.
• Help build bridges, coalitions and dialogues among stakeholders.
• Facilitate the community's (or state's or country's) collective intelligence and long-term well-being.
• Use the issue at hand to educate people about co-intelligence, at every opportunity.
• Embed the issue in its actual complexity and resources to address that complexity.

It is good to remember that when you combine co-intelligence-building with issue-based activism, you can't control the outcome (as if you could with other strategies!). A well-facilitated public may or may not arrive at the conclusions favored by a given set of activists, but they will arrive at outcomes that are right for them, at least for the moment. Ideally, co-intelligent activism will have increased the public's capacity to continue to see clearly and to learn well from the results of their collective decisions.

Dialogue

This dedication to learning shapes the role of nonviolence in co-intelligent activism. Co-intelligent activists use the tactics of nonviolent power politics—protests, strikes, sit-ins, lawsuits, and so on—not to force their own favorite resolution of the issue at hand, but to advocate for a process whereby the full diversity of views comes together to find and implement solutions that are good from the perspective of the whole community or society.

Some very sophisticated activist groups operate with two branches. One does civil disobedience and nonviolent "direct action," while the other is always ready to engage in real dialogue. When government agencies or corporations join them in serious dialogue, there are no protests. If those institutions refuse, or withdraw, or renege on their agreements, then protest actions and lawsuits suddenly begin again. Everyone involved needs to recognize that the generative dialogue that characterizes so much of cooperative and holistic politics requires a certain level of "peerness," of direct person-to-person creative engagement, not playing political one-up games, lying, and manipulation.

Yet another approach is possible for those activists who believe that dialogue may bring compromises harmful to the larger community, to life, or to future generations. This is the path I call "resonant intelligence." Here the test of co-intelligence is whether their work is so grounded in humanity's deep "core commons," so informed by love and respect for all life—including their adversaries—and so well designed that they truly invite widespread resonance and transformation on behalf of all life.

In this case, they are not so much issuing demands as witnessing and crying out on behalf of injured life, calling out to the unconscious parts of life to wake up and move toward healing and wholeness for all. Any resistance they encounter, they meet openly, dialogically, and empathically in a search for greater truth and wholeness. They become part of the body politic's collectively intelligent struggle for greater understanding and wisdom, helping all parts of the whole to deepen into common ground.

Thus it is in the co-intelligent activists' interest—regardless of which strategy they choose—to establish the most effective dialogues possible, and to facilitate the highest wisdom and the most healing implementation of that which results.

Done well, co-intelligent activism generates increased awareness that building collective intelligence and community wisdom facilitates the resolution of all other issues. More people realize that, to the extent we solve this one all-embracing issue, we can rest assured that every other issue will be intelligently addressed. If people realize that not solving this systemic issue will undermine their efforts to resolve their other issues, they will take action.

How great it would be if all issue-oriented public interest and transformational movements invested just a small part of their resources in increasing the capacity of the society to "metabolize"—to reflect on and deal with—the many problems and solutions we all know about.

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