Zones of attention
Kate here, thinking about fluidity, attention, and fractal practices
Dear Lynne,
Gosh, so many links and potential jumping off points in your last post! I love your reminder of the permaculture ethics of earth share, people care and fair share - and really agree that “fair share” is the most complex when thinking about organisations, especially earth-centred holistic ones. How can we even begin to think equitably about pay in a context of such massive inequality, both in this country and particularly globally?
Maybe we can come back to that, but for today I want to stick with the concept of zones, and dig in a bit more to what you point out is their fractal nature.
I love the permaculture principle of “using small and slow solutions”, especially when combined with the emergent strategy principle that “the large is a reflection of the small” (or, like you say, everything is fractal). I have this image of people coming to work, each of them their own zone 0s, with different zones emanating outwards from them - and potentially sometimes intersecting.
Like you say, are the zones from a personal perspective zones of relationality? To me I wonder if this is another way of saying zones of attention - where do we spend our time and attentional energy? For me, right now, this is mainly hyper local:
0 - me, inside my own head, and inhabiting my own body
1 - my daughter, partner, sister, nephew, house, garden, and, honestly, books (I’m reading a lot of books for pleasure at the moment, like a reawoken teenager1)
2 - my work, which I mainly do on a computer or my phone in an studio I share with my sister and a friend, the gym. Given where both of these are I find myself spending a whole lot of time in Wood Green (which is a 10 minute bike ride away and neither woody nor green).
3 - my close friends, my dad, my neighbours, my neighbourhood, the local park, my daughter’s school and the rippling networks of connections there
4 - the rest of London, with bright spots where people I love live
5 - the world beyond! which I occasionally venture out into for work or pleasure
I’m aware that I’m writing this right at the end of the school holidays, after a month of not doing very much work, and of taking full advantage of my new parenting technique of “let’s both sit next to each other and read our own books to ourselves”. This zoning exercise might look quite different if I re-did it when I’m knee deep in facilitation jobs in the middle of September.
As a freelancer I’ve been really enjoying Sarah Weiler’s concept of the Carousel, with its embrace of the way projects come into and out of focus, and I think this works here as well. If I think of these zones of attention as concentric circles, they are also constantly moving and shifting, even (especially!) the zone inside my own head. None of this is static.
So what happens when someone, with their own shifting, intersecting, fractal zones of attention and relationality, sits down to work in an organisation full of others with different, also constantly shifting zones? I’m sure we’ve all been in organisations where work itself means different things to different people - that for some it’s firmly in zone 1, as a fundamental part of themselves, whereas for others it’s a functional thing in zone 3 or 4. Even something as simple as understanding what role work plays in our and others’ lives can lead to better understanding and connection.
And of course we come across the fact that wherever we go, there we are. Like you say the challenges we all have in zone 0 can really play out at work. I love the way you phrase it: “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.” I agree that an earth-centred holistic organisation would look to “create space for people to meet their inner demons from time to time”.
This all means, I think, that earth centred holistic organisations would pay just as much attention to the extitution (the social relationships and dynamics within an organisation) as the institution - the formal structures. They would invest time in helping make sure people understood what motivated them to be doing this work, and what that motivation was for others (a potential nice use for user manuals, maybe). They would seek to create opportunities for people to find out where their zones of attention overlap. They would - and this is the hard thing, I think - have practices that help people consistently reflect on their responses to and reactions to things.
One place I’ve seen this happen is at Catalyst CIC, where I’m a NED - their wellbeing policy explicitly includes a small budget for people to spend on wellbeing, expansively defined - including therapy. That, combined with a commitment to sociocratic practices and being honest about feelings and what assumptions we’re making, feels like the beginning of a really different kind of organisation. It is real work, though, and certainly takes more time and commitment in the beginning. I’m curious about how you create these kind of cultures in bigger or more established organisations, but I’m sure that it’s possible.
Some of these practices are things like retrospectives and other types of reflective learning work (which can be hard enough to make time for in the scarcity-based reality of so much organisational life). One thing the lovely Abi Handley introduced to us at Catalyst is the concept of “mind reads” where you notice and make explicit the assumptions you are making about other people’s thoughts or motivations. This is like the galaxy brain level evolution of the check in, and requires a lot of bravery and vulnerability but can really unblock and move things on - it’s amazing how differently we all experience the same things.
This practice helps keep us grounded in the small as well, in our own and others’ experience of the world - and I think it’s from there that we can start to build the large in a way that creates the world we want to see. I hope, at least.
with lots of hopeful love,
Kate
with maybe a little more appreciation for middle aged heroes like Amina al-Sirafi and Armand Gamache