Running circles around myself
Lynne here, getting scared by the actual zones of relationality in my life.
Dear Kate,
Ah I love that your last letter carried us into the world of permaculture! One thing I love about permaculture principles is that they can take the watery and wafty ideas and ground them in a set of tangible practices that apply in different contexts. Permaculture principles seem just at home when considering our relationship to a piece of land, a business or a livelihood. Permaculture practice emphasises design using a set of principles that draw on patterns of the natural world, so it seems like a natural place to hang out a while, while we’re exploring Earth-Centred Holistic Organisations.
There is so much to explore within the world of permaculture. The ethics of earth care, people care and fair share make a great mantra for an organisation and probably underline quite well what we are talking about with Earth-Centred Holistic Organisations. They are quite self-explanatory so I won’t labour them, though I do think that the concept of fair share is the hardest. What is fair share in this current world? Who are we comparing our fair share to? How do we figure out how we pay ourselves, for example, when the skills in the team demand a day rate or salary far beyond what a global fair share actually looks like? I want to earn more than the current UK living wage, but can that possibly be a fair share in a world in which many in the UK and globally live precariously in or on the edge of poverty? Should I even bother comparing my income in this way when the world's wealthiest people earn more in an hour than I will likely earn in my lifetime?
These questions steer me, rather conveniently, to one of my favourite permaculture concepts. You mentioned it last week too - zones. The permy world looks at our world in concentric circles of zones 1-5 and sometimes 0-5, with zero being the self/home, 1, as you said, being where you’d design for the things you need most and 5 the outer edge of your influence. One thing that I’ve not seen explored so much in permaculture circles is the idea that these zones have a fractal nature to them depending on how you define them.
For an organisation you could explore these as zones of relationality. And you could explore a few different ways to zone the beast, for example:
Zone 0 - Self
Zone 1 - Team
Zone 2 - Whole organisation
Zone 3 - Sector
Zone 4 - All organisations
Zone 5 - All human Systems
Or perhaps you’d zone it:
Zone 0 - Organisation
Zone 1 - Partners/collaborators/allies
Zone 2 - Sector
Zone 3 - All organisations
Zone 4 - All human systems
Zone 5 - All Earth systems
Or perhaps:
Zone 0 - Self
Zone 1 - Closest colleagues
Zone 2 - Team
Zone 3 - Department
Zone 4 - Whole organisation
Zone 5 - Partners/collaborators/allies
The reason I love the fractal nature of this is that I think it touches on something fundamental. With the inner-most zone possibly being the self or the whole organisation we can consider them both in the same way. What is your relationship with yourself? What is your relationship with your organisation? What can we learn between the differences and similarities in how we answer that question? I believe that there is a huge amount of juice there - for personal development, for professional development and for organisational development. The world is a mirror - as within so without.
To me, an Earth-centred Holistic Organisation takes steps with the team to bridge and heal some of the troubled aspects of these inner relationships. An organisation is its people, so when there is a misalignment between an individual's inner relationships (self/team/organisation) there will be a misalignment between the organisation and the wider world. In order to do this bridging and healing, however, requires more than an organisation can usually offer. I’ve never been in an organisation that can fully invest in the team in this way - healing is slow, for an organisation it is expensive and neither the market nor funders will fund this. But I have witnessed that creating space for people to meet their inner demons from time to time can have revolutionary results.
Despite the fact that permaculture puts Earth-care as ethic #1, this zoning exercise is usually a human-centred activity. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, all of the natural world interacts with its own kind as a preference so we’re simply following natural patterns. However, I feel it is important to do it consciously. So it might be fun to take a non-human-centred lens on my own zones of relationality.
Perhaps something like:
Zone 0 - self
Zone 1 - Air, water, food systems, home
Zone 2 - My phone, computer and software I use to interact with people
Zone 3 - Neighbourhood friends/acquaintances, local jackdaws, birds and plants.
Zone 4 - Friends/family, rivers and places that I visit often
Zone 5 - The wider world
😱 Okay actually this scares me. I’m suddenly very aware that I am currently single, childless and live alone. I am actually terrified at where I had to place my online existence to be truthful. I can see instantly that there is a big misalignment in how my personal zones are set up compared to what I want my life to be like. But my personal life journey for another time. That was a useful exercise.
Perhaps it’s time I get a cat.
With love,
Lynne