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Soeben erschien Hanno Burmester und Clemens Holtmanns Buch „Liebeserklärung an eine Partei, die es nicht gibt“ (Auszug und Leseprobe hier). Es ist der Entwurf einer anderen, in meinen Worten (EF) integralen Gestalt von politischer Partei, der gleichsam incognito daherkommt.

Bruno and I are most grateful to Elke Fein and IFIS for this opportunity to share details of our book “Metathinking” in IFIS' Online Colloquium n° 38.  We were hoping that we would get a warm reception and interest from the Integral community and we were not disappointed. It was wonderful for us to have such a numerous and receptive audience.

At the IFIS Colloquium on 11 November I presented an idea about the way we speak to each other about important decisions, complex issues or troubling situations. The idea is not mine, but comes from an architect, Christopher Alexander. As a designer of spaces where people live, visit and go about their lives, he observed. In part he observed himself, and in part he observed the spaces he visited.

Siehe auch: https://www.archiv.ifis-freiburg.de/node/186

Ich versuche mal, eine Bilanz des Experiments Online-Aufstellung (IFIS Online-Kolloquium Nr. 33) zu ziehen.

(Siehe: https://www.ifis-freiburg.de/sites/www.ifis-freiburg.de/files/img_ifis/I...)

I experienced the Colloquium as a safe and deep space of like-minded people willing to walk the extra mile when it comes to the boundaries of science. I really liked the warm welcome and professional facilitation. Even if it is only an online space, you can see and feel the community and practice and engage in a safe space.

Bericht und Fragmente vom evolve-Salon in Freiburg, 23.11.2019 mit Geseko von Lüpke und Thomas Steininger

„Das Herz jeder Revolution ist die Revolution des Herzens“. (Charles Eisenstein, Autor von Climate: A New Story und The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible)

We feel fortunate and happy to have been invited to share our life’s work, and our passions, with the IFIS community. The Colloquium context and participants made it a safe space to share and be received. This was a natural and nourishing container which allowed us to be ourselves and for the group to explore what we offered. All in all, we were pleased with the kindness, generosity, and curiosity of the community and the flow of the evening and its process.  

Eindrücke vom evolve LIVE! Event in Wien

Some reflective thoughts:

The Colloquium was very professionally handled with many curious and well-informed people who could both question and contribute.

My goal was to test out a new process on story-telling around personal values with a construct aware crowd, that I think would be hard in a regular audience. The experiment was successful and the more playful approach to development was appreciated.

Reflective statement about my input to the IFIS Online Colloquium

A) How did you experience our Colloquium, in general, and the way your presentation was handled there?

The colloquium was well prepared in close cooperation. So an inspiring agenda was created to achieve a good combination of information, reflexion, intuition and dialogue. 

B) Did you have specific goals, concerns or objectives connected to your presentation, and how has the Colloquium helped you to achieve those? 

The colloquium gathered a wide range of highly competent and engaged people. I was given plenty of time to explain my views and was asked clarifying and relevant questions by the participants. 

In the talk, we explored the six new forms of metamodern politics, and interesting comments and suggestions were offered by people in the group. 

As listeners, the colloquium participants were ideal, seeming to deeply engage with what was being said by others and myself. 

Editorial note:

Bernard Le Roux was the presenter in our Online Colloquium n° 20, in which he shared experience from his dialog and mediation work with Swedish municipalities. As a Kick-off question, Bernard invited participants to explore the following question:

How do we understand the resistance of powerful people to participation processes, and to an honest, open conversation that actually addresses the issue? 

Here is Bernard's reflection of the Colloquium:

It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to present during the IFIS Online Colloquium session on Mach 21st, 2018. Thank you for inviting me.

It was a pleasure describing the StageLens automated assessment technology to the IFIS attendees. I found the questions and conversation to be fruitful and I look forward to follow-up opportunities to dive deeper.

It was interesting to engage with an informed audience around dynamic skill theory and the Lectica assessment model. Discussion around the lenses people used to evaluate the order of statements in the exercise was rich and helped to illuminate how any kind of ordering we do in trying to understand phenomenon is subject to the lens we use to perceive and make meaning of the phenomenon. As well, questions helped to illuminate the boundaries within which such assessments can be useful and contexts, focal points or conditions under which it might not be adequate.

Normally I am quite sceptical concerning hybrid and new technologies for communication and prefer the classical set-up with people in front of me I can interact with. But this was surely a very good example to the contrary. I would have never thought that it is in fact possible, even fun to have a good colloquium via internet. (It’s possible to have one, but whether it is good is another question. This one I found was good.) I have done that once previously and found it very tedious, because there was always the odd glitch. Now it worked perfectly well.

Resilience – a useful "one word answer" to the recent increase in crises?
An integral approach

The above presentation during the IFIS Online Colloquium on November 30, 2016, was part of my ongoing reflections within the frame of my postdoctoral lecture qualification.

Meta-studies are integrative endeavours.  But when does the search for integration and integral become a colonising endeavour?  Where are the boundaries that distinguish a holistic integration from and a totalising meta-narrative?  

Why is there an outpouring of energy for democracy and freedom in the Middle East, in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen? Trying to explain this is difficult and there are obviously many factors at play into what has led up to the public demonstrations against undemocratic and tyrannical governments throughout this region. An integral meta-studies approach is useful in providing an analysis of these explanations because it flexibly employs multiple lenses and is conscious of the limits on the range of theoretical lenses it can use to develop explanations of complex social events.

I expect that, in the wake of the Luxembourg Symposium called "Research Across Boundaries: Advances in [meta]theory Building", there will be the beginnings of a new climate around the whole notion of developing integral and integrative big pictures.