The Road to Authentic Community
To reach higher levels of maturity, organizations need to engage in developmental renewal. Developmental renewal is a knowledge-creating practice. As such, it requires an understanding of how knowledge is uncovered.
Pseudocommunities
Within companies, pseudocommunities are habituated to ineffective communication. Instead of growing, their employees spend time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions, playing politics, while hiding their inadequacies, uncertainties, and limitations. As developmental psychologist Robert Kegan points out, behaviors like these represent the single biggest loss of resources organizations suffer every day.
PSEUDOCOMMUNITIES
When communities are not mature enough to meet the conditions of their external and internal environments, they become what Dr. M. Scott Peck coined as pseudocommunities.
An institution operating as a pseudocommunity starts to decline by creating pseudo-solutions—solutions that recycle the problem rather than really solve it. That’s because they tend to solve problems from their institution’s existing developmental level. Problems, however, propagate at higher levels of development than the environment which created them.
DEVELOPMENTAL RENEWAL
To reach higher levels of maturity, organizations need to engage in developmental renewal. Developmental renewal is a knowledge-creating practice. As such, it requires an understanding of how knowledge is uncovered.
Heuristic discovery is the tacit dimension of the scientific method. It is practiced but not explicitly taught by pioneering inventors and innovators. The heuristic method awakens a tacit dimension of awareness, where discovery is not the product of a logical deduction. Instead, it comes from what is often perceived as an external agency.
Developmentally mature leaders rely upon this external agency as part of their decision-making and problem solving work. They attune to it for inspiration, by using self-management practices that promote their ongoing renewal. Those leaders are then able to guide their organization through community formation and developmental renewal.
This discipline is designed to lead groups into a state of emptiness, from which they can seek insights into their deepest and most complex problems. When it becomes a consistent practice, this communal discipline can reinvent or even transform the entire institution.
AUTHENTIC COMMUNITY
When a learning organization functions effectively, they behave more like communities than organizations. As leaders take their institutions out of the pseudocommunity stage, the overall environment might appear chaotic. The real issue is not that there is actually more chaos. Rather, it’s the pre-existing and inherent chaos that is now uncovered. Community members who were fighting by tacit rules of engagement start to differ more overtly. Blame, judgment, and disagreements that festered in pseudocommunity are now released.
There are two ways out of this state. The easier one leads to a reorganized form of pseudocommunity. The more difficult way out, is through emptiness, where leaders teach their organizations to empty themselves of unconscious assumptions, tacit habits and habituated social rules.
The final movement out of emptiness and into authentic community is “received” more than led. It occurs when the letting go process has reached deep enough. Authentic community is characterized by interconnectedness and communal flow states. Leadership and followership become equivalent, while community consciousness emerges, setting the stage for collective intelligence.
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