by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

Margaret Wheatley is recognized as one of North America's leading thinkers on community development, leadership and organizational management. Her work appears in award-winning books such as Leadership and the New Science, A Simpler Way and Turning to One Another. Her most recent book is entitled Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time.
Wheatley presents the keynote talk Whatever the Question, Community Is the Answer at the Haven Institute's Third International Symposium. This year’s theme is C-ING the Future -- Caring, Chaos, Connection, April 7, 7:30 pm, Hyatt Regency, Vancouver. For symposium details, contact the Haven Institute, 877-247-9238, ext. 234. www.margaretwheatley.com

We human beings have a great need of one another. As West African writer and teacher Malidoma Some notes, we have "an instinct of community." However, this instinct is now materializing as growing fragmentation and separation. We experience increasing ethnic wars, militia groups, specialized interest clubs and chat rooms. We use the instinct of community to separate and protect us from one another, rather than to create a global culture of diverse, yet interwoven, communities. Clearly, we cannot get to a future worth inhabiting through these separating paths. Our great task is to rethink our understanding of community so that we can embrace the planetary community.
It is ironic that we live surrounded by communities that know how to connect to others and succeed in creating sustainable relationships over long periods of time. These communities are the webs of relationships called ecosystems. Everywhere in nature, communities of diverse individuals live together in ways that support both the individual and the entire system. As they spin these systems into existence, new capabilities and talents emerge from the process of being together. These systems teach that the instinct of community is not peculiar to humans, but is found everywhere in life, from microbes to the most complex species. They also teach that the way in which individuals weave themselves into ecosystems is paradoxical. This paradox can be a great teacher to us.
Life takes form as individuals that immediately reach out to create systems of relationships. These individuals and systems arise from two seemingly conflicting forces: the absolute need for individual freedom and the unequivocal need for relationships. In human society, we struggle with the tension between these two forces. But in nature, successful examples of this paradox abound and reveal surprising treasures of insight. It is possible to create resilient and adaptive communities that welcome our diversity as well as our membership.
Life's first imperative is that it must be free to create itself.
One biological definition of life is that something is alive if it has the capacity to create itself. Life begins with this primal freedom to create, the capacity for self-determination. An individual creates itself with a boundary that distinguishes it from others. This freedom gives rise to the boundless diversity of the planet and is so much a part of life that Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela advise that we can never direct a living system; we can only hope to get its attention. Life accepts only partners, not bosses, because self-determination is its very root of being.
Life's second great imperative propels individuals to search for community. Life is systems-seeking; there is the need to be in relationship, to be connected to others. Biologist Lynn Margulis notes that independence is not a concept that explains the living world. It is only a political concept we've invented. Individuals cannot survive alone. They move out continuously to discover which relationships they require and which relationships are possible. Evolution progresses from these new relationships, not from the harsh and lonely dynamics of survival of the fittest. Species that decide to ignore relationships, that act in greedy and rapacious ways, simply die off. If we look at the evolutionary record, it is cooperation that increases over time. Only in relationship can one fully be one's self. The instinct of community is everywhere in life.
As systems form, the paradox of individualism and connectedness becomes clearer. Individuals are figuring out how to be together. They do not act from a blinding instinct for self-preservation. Nor do they act as passive recipients of someone else's demands. They are never forced to change, but as they choose to change, the "other" is a major influence on their individual decisions. As a system forms from such co-evolutionary processes, the new system provides a level of stability and protection that was not available when individuals were isolated. Members develop new talents and abilities as they work out relationships with others. Both individuals and systems grow in skill and complexity. The very idea of boundaries changes profoundly. Rather than being a self-protective wall, boundaries become the place of meeting and exchange.
Human communities are no different than the rest of life. We form our communities from the need for self-determination and the need for one another. However, in modern society, we have difficulty embracing this inherent paradox. We reach to satisfy one at the expense of the other. Very often, the price of belonging to a community is the forfeiting of one's autonomy. Communities form around specific standards, doctrines and traditions. Instead of honouring the individual as a unique contributor to the community, as is common among indigenous peoples, individuals are required to conform, obey and serve "the greater good" of the community. But inclusion exacts a high price: our individual self-expression. With the loss of personal autonomy, diversity not only disappears, it also becomes a major management problem. The community spends more and more energy on new ways to exert control over individuals.
The price that communities pay for this conformity is exhausting, and for its members, literally deadly. In seeking to be a community member, we cannot truly abandon our need for self-expression. In the most restrictive communities, our need for freedom creeps in around the edges, or moves us out of the community altogether. We modify our look and clothing, create cliques that support our particular manner of being, form splinter groups, disagree over doctrine, create warring schisms, or we leave. These behaviours demonstrate the unstoppable need for self-creation, even while we crave the support of others.
Particularly in the West, we move toward isolationism in order to defend our individual freedom. We choose a life lived alone and give up the meaningful life that can only be discovered in relationship. An African proverb says, "Alone, I have seen many marvellous things, none of which are true." What we can see from our pursuit of loneliness is the terrible price exacted for such independence. We end up in deep, vacant places, overwhelmed by loneliness and the emptiness of life. It seems that whenever we bargain with life and seek to satisfy only one of its two great needs, the result is a quality of true lifelessness. We must live within the paradox; life does not allow us to choose sides. Our communities must support our individual freedom and individuals must acknowledge their neighbours and make choices based on the desire to be in relationship with them.
At first glance, the world wide web seems to be a source of new communities. But these groups do not embrace the paradox of community. The great potential of a world connected electronically is being used to create stronger boundaries that keep us isolated. We are responding to our instinct of community, but we form highly specialized groups in the image of ourselves, groups that reinforce our separateness from the rest of society. We are not asked to contribute our uniqueness, only our sameness. We are not asked to encounter, much less celebrate the fact that we need one another's gifts. We can turn off our computers the moment we're confronted with the discomfort of diversity. Such specialized, self-reflecting networks lead to as much destructiveness of the individual as any dictatorial, doctrine-based organization.
In human communities, freedom and connectedness are kept vibrant by people focussing on what's going on in the heart of the community, rather than being fixated on the community's forms and structures. What called us together? What did we believe was possible together that was not possible alone? These questions invite both our individuality and our desire for relationships. If we stay with these questions and don't try to structure relationships through policies and doctrines, we can create communities that thrive in the paradox.
In our own work, we have seen these communities in schools, towns and organizations. They create themselves around a shared intent and some basic principles about how to be together. They do not get into a prescriptive role with one another. They are not founded on directives, but on desire. The people know why they are together and they have agreed on the conditions of how to be together. And, very importantly, these conditions are kept to a minimum.
One of the most heartening examples we've encountered is a junior high school, whose students, faculty and staff agree that all behaviours and decisions are based on only three rules: 1) Take care of yourself. 2) Take care of each other. 3) Take care of this place. These rules are sufficient to keep them connected and focussed and open enough to allow for diverse and individual responses to any situation. (The fact that this worked so well in a junior high environment should make us all sit up and take notice!) The principal reported that after the building had to be evacuated during a rainstorm, he later entered the building alone and was greeted by 800 pairs of shoes in the lobby. The children had decided, in that particular circumstance, how to "take care of this place."
We have also seen businesses and large cities rally around a renewed and clear sense of collective purpose. A chemical plant becomes clear that it wants to contribute to the safety of the globe by its safe manufacturing processes; a city determines that it wants to be a place where children can thrive. This clarity helps every individual exercise his/her freedom to decide how best to contribute to this deeply shared purpose. Diversity and unique gifts become a contribution, rather than an issue of compliance or deviance. Problems of diversity disappear as we focus on contribution to a shared purpose, rather than on the legislation of correct behaviour.
Other problematic behaviours also disappear when a community knows its heart, its purpose for being together. The manager of the chemical plant said that he no longer knew where his plant boundaries were, and that it was unimportant to try and define them. Instead, the plant was in more and more relationships with people in the community, the government, suppliers, foreign competitors, churches and school children, all who contributed to the workers' desire to become one of the safest and highest quality plants in the world, a desire which they achieved.
Today, so many of our communities and the institutions that serve them are lost because they lack clarity about why they are together. Few schools know what the community wants of them; the same is true for healthcare and the government. We no longer agree on what we want these institutions to provide, because we no longer are members of communities that know why they are together. Most of us don't feel like we are members of a community; we just live or work next to each other. The great missing conversation is about why and how we might be together.
But as lost as we are, there is great hope. Even in our fractured communities, increasingly, people are in conversation, asking, "Who are we?" and "What matters?" The problem is that these are private conversations occurring around kitchen tables, water coolers and in restaurants. Seldom do these critical, community-forming questions move into our institutions or the broader community. Yet, these are the essential questions.
When we don't answer these questions as a community, when we have no agreements about why we belong together, the institutions we create to serve us become battlegrounds that serve no one. All energy goes into warring agendas, new regulations and stronger protective measures against those we dislike and fear. Our institutions dissipate into incoherence and impotence. They do serve us, but only as mirrors that reflect back to us the lack of cohering agreements at the heart of our community. Without these agreements about why we belong together, we can never develop institutions that make any sense at all. In the absence of these agreements, our instinct of community leads us to a community of "me," not a community of "we."
Most public meetings, although originating from a democratic ideal, serve only to increase our separation from each other. Agendas and processes try to honour our differences, but end up increasing our distance. They are "public hearings" where nobody is listening and everyone is demanding airtime. Communities aren't created from such processes; they are destroyed by the increasing fear and separation that these processes engender.
We don't need more public hearings. We need much more public listening, in processes where we come together and commit to staying together long enough to discover those ideas and issues that are significant to each of us.
All of us can reach entirely new levels of possibility together, possibilities that are not available from soapbox rhetoric. To achieve this, we need to begin these conversations about purpose and shared significance and commit to staying in them. We are capable of creating wonderful and vibrant communities when we discover what dreams of possibility we share. The history of most community organizing and great social change movements can be traced back to such conversations.
As we create communities from the cohering centre of shared significance, from a mutual belief in why we belong together, we will discover what is already visible everywhere around us in living systems. Our great creativity and diversity and desire for contribution and relationships blossom when the heart of our community is clear and beckoning, and when we refrain from cluttering our paths with proscriptions and demands. The future of community is best taught by life.