What would your mid-summer night’s dream be?

Mid-summer, a time of ‘mayhem and madness’ when the recognised order of things is turned on its head and the boundaries between worlds, human and fairies - according to William Shakespeare - dissolve. It’s a place of parked judgement and licence, where what we’ve been educated into and domesticated out of holds no sway, even time and space are bent in a way that sci-fiction writers of a later age would have been proud.

Therefore, this mid-summer night my dream is of redundancy.

In fact, it’s more than a dream, it’s what I aim for as a learning facilitator and coach. At a time of massive change and challenge in our working lives, where the gap between those with and without is widening, and the numbers who count each penny is growing with an unrestrained alacrity, my statement is surely idiotic. Am I not exercising a naïve privilege? Possibly. However, my point is bigger and bolder than my individual privileges, obvious or hidden. Taken to its limit, I’d like to see working environments where my role wasn’t redundant, but obsolete.

So, what would it take to make my role obsolete? It would take the wide spread development of and growth in self-sustaining generative communities. Within a company or institution, such a community would be made up of a network of individuals and teams spread throughout the organisation, reaching across all pay grades and power structures, and connecting functions and departments.

For me ‘a self-sustaining generative community’ is a self-selecting group of individuals who in working together learn actively, with and from each other. They use the community to explore and find solutions to challenges, great and small, that enhance the individual, the team, and the work of the company or institution. Free from ‘an expert guiding hand’, they draw on the knowledge, experience and curiosity of each member, with equity lying at the heart of such a community. Equity, both in access to power and responsibility for ensuring that it is collectively endorsed. These principles enable the group to explore change and initiate actions at the individual, group and organisational level. The outcomes that the team will be looking for transform and adapt. The solutions move beyond solving a specific problem or achieving a pre-ordained goal.

Growing in this way allows for autonomy and advocacy at the individual and team level. It builds bridges between siloed departments and functions and can, with the full engagement and commitment of senior leads, release hidden talent and foster greater access to and use of a range of skills vital to thriving and working among the complexities of the 21st century

How far up an organisation’s leadership ladder is this engagement going to travel? All the way. A self-sustaining generative community can’t deliver unless time is given up and space created throughout an organisation. There is no C-Suite Get Out of Gaol Free Card with this model of learning and change.

Therefore, what does full engagement look like? I won’t pretend that such a step is easy, it demands that everyone leave their role and responsibilities at the metaphorical door, and that the group builds respect and trust through what is offered and explored in the learning space. It demands cultural and emotional intelligence, and both of these ask for a level of self-knowledge and honest introspection before one can appreciate, let alone begin to understand another person’s cultural makeup and emotional narrative.

And that is when the real learning begins, and the power of a self-sustaining generative community truly becomes apparent.

In a world of individual learning and tailored content, of bite sized modules, and gaming platforms, all of which place power in the hands of the learner, which is a situation to be applauded, the creation and development of a self-sustaining generative community is an act of collaboration in learning not the individual pursuit of learning.

Here the learning is collective and the input diverse and various. The content is fashioned by the group and what they are seeking to achieve, and time contracts and relaxes to meet internal demands rather than external pressures.

One thing we have surely had reinforced over the last two and a half years is that change is a fact of living. It’s mapped onto our DNA. Change is thorny, unsettling not without pain. We relish it in some situations; the seed that becomes the tree; the baby that becomes the toddler, even the flour, fat, and eggs that become the pastry, pudding or cake. In other situations its’ demands back us into the proverbial corner. We freeze, we flee or we fight. We tell ourselves that we need control, and yet have little idea what we are controlling and even less idea what might help us find out. All systems are down. We have a major outage, the power has been cut and we stand awkwardly with our inability to say “I don’t know.”

For me this is why self-sustaining generative communities are a powerful tool and an essential ingredient in growing ourselves as individuals and building our places of work as places of active change and what we produce as objects and services as being of value and having worth.

Over to you, for as I say my mid-summer night’s dream is one of redundancy, no obsolescence.

However, if you are thrown by my idea, remember this mid-summer, Puck’s words and all will be well.

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here,

While these visions did appear,

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding, but a dream.”

A Way of Dreaming

A mid-summer night's sky

La Caminante de Luna