LEADERSHIP AFFINITY NETWORK

It feels like this is starting to happen. I posted a brief project description on the NCDD/Transpartisan mailing list a few days ago, and Integral Leadership Review editor Russ Volkmann asked me to write an article for the magazine. So I did that yesterday, and I can feel these pieces falling into place.

The "affinity" aspects of the project involve fast-click tag clouds, where the options are taken from lists that are customized for specialized demographics we want to pull into a single resonant/constructive conversation. The basic frame of the system is a concept from Barbara Marx Hubbard, that she calls "Pattern of the Whole" -- which revolves around her concept of "the wheel of co-creation".

http://networknation.net/pattern.cfm?whl=11&lv1=101154&lv2=101105&lv3=103115&lv4=103116&lv5=0&lv6=0&lv7=0#go

This amounts to a kind of populist category system for organizing the full range of social issues and aspects, and though in some ways simplistic, can be interpreted in ways consistent with the "Dewey Decimal System" -- which can make it a powerful and high-capacity way to catalog a huge array of floating elements that can "come together in wholeness" through a single integral design. At the moment, this seems very potent, and do-able.

So, the Leadership Affinity Network would involve a focused outreach to specific demographic groups -- "the women's movement" -- "the interfaith movement" -- "the integral politics movement" -- etc. -- each in a customized way. If we wanted to pull together religious and spiritual groups into a common interspiritual framework, we could write customized invitations for distinct religious/spiritual groups, always emphasizing common ground, but approaching that theme in ways that acknowledge the special/unique perspective of each tradition.

In the fields of religion and spirituality and ethics, we can work on developing a common/shared moral/ethical center. In the context of politics and governance, we can link hundreds of concerns together, and propose to link them through the emerging common moral/ethical center. In the field of "group process", we can find hundreds of process facilitators and "circle conveners" who have the skills and instincts to help nurture things like this, and engage them from their own particular angle.

And on "issues" -- the hundreds or thousands (literally infinite number) of issues of concerns that divide the human community -- we can hold all of that together in a common frame, and negotiate the entire process through balance and resonance.

Yes, a rather huge thing to be thinking about or proposing. But -- it somehow feels workable. Let's see what happens....