Appreciatively watching networks work is my new hobby. This week (for the first time since March 12 2020) Omni is holding a real, in-person event! It’s a Butterfly Garden Workshop tomorrow, and the organizer just told me to post the livestream times to our Facebook groups and pages. Wow, our network is at work! That’s pretty exciting!
All the details are in the next article if you want to join the livestream. Michael Cockram is a gifted local architect on the Omni Board, and he’s planning a series of nature workshops that our network will be really interested in. I think the next one is supposed to be a Sweetbush workshop Mike and Burnetta Hinterthuer are developing. Don’t you love those native Arkansas flora? If we’re going to save our planet, it’s great to be able to start right at home with natives.
For me, glimpses of networks are appearing everywhere now. I’m searching for ways to make our world more sustainable and resilient, and I keep coming back to strong networks.
None of us can escape networks, but Western culture, and especially American culture, are so focused on individualism that the presence and power of the networks in our lives are not only ignored, but actively suppressed. Business networks, for instance… all businesses value their networks. That’s where you mostly hear the word. But a business network is mostly a transactional network that’s vulnerable to consumer choice. It might break down when some other business sells cheaper. The other place you hear about networks is the internet, which is a whole different train of thought and gets technical really fast.
What I’m talking about is the human network. The people and groups in your life, linked together by invisible threads of relationship and feeling. Those networks have existed since before the first human and they’re powerful and irreplaceable parts of every healthy person’s life. They’re what families and communities are really constructed out of. But often, we aren’t aware of them. They’re just there. In a world of rugged individuals like white American imagines itself, the human network becomes just a tool for business like the internet without seeing the inherent power the human network holds all on its own.
I remember a photo by a journalist asking people across the world to show him where they slept at night. It was a fascinating look at how different our lives are at the same time we are sharing the same ritual of sleep. This photo was of a homeless 10-year-old whose bed was a mattress in the middle of an empty field. He was all alone. The look on the child’s face was hauntingly lonely. That’s a human whose network has collapsed. No family. No community. No one who cares. I wonder where that child is now? There are so many like him in the rugged individual world.
Life doesn’t have to be that way. We all want “a more beautiful world through creating regenerative cultures, resilient economies and collaborative self-governance systems.” (Anna Kovasana from GEN EcoVillage International). Right now so much is being learned about how human networks operate and how to make them work well that we in Northwest Arkansas deserve to understand how to make this happen for ourselves.
There are a lot of great Network Weavers in this town. I know a bunch of you. You might be wondering what that means. What’s wrong with our networks already? Aren’t we doing pretty well?
This is where science comes in handy. Fayetteville has many active networks. That’s the basis of what people mean when they say that we have a strong community feel that some towns lack. All these Network Weavers create it. They cluster here because the core progressive values of the area welcome that (that’s my observation, not network science). The science comes in as network research shows how networks develop and interrelate, and what can happen in them if they develop in certain directions toward what network theorist June Holley calls “transformational networks.”
At a moment when 99% of people on the planet are searching for ways to make change happen, the concept of transformational networks need to get into our everyday vocabulary.
Explaining that in a few words is not that easy. However, yesterday June Holley spoke at the EcoVillage Global Summit and had a great conversation about this very thing. If I can get her pefrmission I’ll share the link. But until then here’s one particular slide that helps explain the different between everyday networks and transformational networks.
Because networks develop in stages.
On the left side you see a group of scattered people and networks bubbling along. It may be a local community or some part of a community. They’re doing fine as long as things are fine in their rugged individual world. The next stage is when something makes the community think their networks should know more about each other. One thing that happens here is that those of us who organize events and activities would like to know what other groups are doing so we don’t schedule things when somebody else is doing something cool. We’ve been struggling with that for years, as you know.
Frequently what happens is that one person, or one group, takes responsibility for creating that unifying link, which shifts the wide network into a hub and spoke form.
This structure works for scheduling events, but it won’t create a system-shifting, or transformative network. And what I’d like to suggest is that now is the moment when we need transformative networks like never before, because they’re a key tool for helping our community, our country and our world step out of the paradigm that we’re trapped in and start devising the brand-new everything that’s longing to emerge. AND do it in ways that are creatively invented by the people of the community, not enforced by some top-down Master of the Universe.
About transformative networks, June Holley says “Transformation is about deep changes in the nature of relationships, power, allocation or flow of resources, values and/or systems” and For transformation to occur, networks need to be structured to generate maximum innovation.
A network moves to the stage of transformative by shifting to the 3rd state of Self-Organizing. That might be a new term to some, and it’s discouraged in our top-down system where we’re raised in an education system and a culture where somebody on top is supposed to make decisions about what happens, and give orders to us peons below. But self-organizing isn’t all that difficult once people get the hang of it. Little League moms deciding who’s going to pick up the kids today is one model.
It’s also possible to use self-organizing for starting a business, a movement, or highly complex global projects. Network theory suggests that at a point like this where radical change has become necessary for survival, there’s lots of uncertainty about what the best course of action might be, and there’s massive disagreement about which direction to take to get to “best,” that self-organizing for small test projects is a potentially powerful way for people to explore diverse options with low risk. And there are ways to encourage self-organized test projects that communities can create.
Right now, June Holley’s talk about networks is still up on the EcoVillage Summit site, and I hope she can get it posted on the Network Weaver webpage soon. If you need more information, this is where she does a very nice job of explaining the big overview in simple, non-technical ways.
June Holley talking about what transformative networks look like at the recent Global EcoVillage Summit – how they work.
https://summit2021.ecovillage.org/talks/june-holley-1/
