At Home with Change: How Groups Co-Create with Ria Baeck

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener:
Welcome back to the Living Love podcast. My name is Beth Tener and we are now in Season 3 and our theme of season 3 is “What does it mean to feel at home here?” As I thought about what we could talk about in this season, I recognized that the ability of people to feel at home, particularly in a group, in the place that they live, is foundational for us to co-create, to learn, to adapt to the big changes that are happening in our world. When we are in times of change, we can hit rigidity, resistance or polarization. Today, I am excited to have Ria Baeck with me.

There’s a great Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I think of Ria as one of those people who’s always at that edge of learning and change, asking “okay, what would the new model look like for how we work together in groups?”

In the previous episode, I was talking with Bruce Nayowith about group processes and experiences. Often when we get really into the deep work, sometimes the conflicts, tensions, or the personalities can split the group apart. We know that some of that is because the old historic traumas or an individual’s stuff gets in the way. We haven’t yet built the structures sufficient to hold all that through those ups and downs.

Ria, I, Bruce and some others were part of a gathering (which we talked about a bit in the previous episode) where we looked at what would the spaces look like to hold space for collective healing. So we had the blessing of working together on that some years ago.

Today, I’m going to be in conversation with Ria about these questions of “How can we be at home with change” and “what kind of ways can groups can co-create?”
I want to welcome you, Ria. Thanks for being here.

Ria Baeck:
Thanks for the invitation.

Beth Tener:
Ria is based in Belgium. I’ll tell you the first way I met you, Ria. A mutual friend of ours, Madeline here in New England, called me up and she said “There’s this workshop with this woman from Belgium named Ria and she’s doing this thing called Constellations and I can’t explain it. You just have to come!” And I did and I was so grateful.
I went to this one day workshop and you were teaching us this systemic change method and talking about living systems in a way that was so much more evolved, even though I talked about systems and was working to change them. You were at this whole other level. I’m forever grateful that you were my doorway to that, and to Art of Hosting, and a lot of other things.

On your website, which is called Collective Presencing, that your work is about the capacity to create safe learning spaces and finding how to design participatory and innovative ways of gathering. I know you have a background as a trauma therapist, is that right?

Ria Baeck:
I studied psychology. Not saying I learned much at university, but at least it got me on a certain track. Then I ended up like 10 years later in a very intensive therapy training, emotional body work, which was a combination of breathing, Reichian therapy, which not many people know, and bioenergetics.

It was a very personally intense growing track and that’s where I learned the skills to be of value for clients who work somewhere. That brought me further into how to work with teams and how to work with bigger systems, like 200 people in a conference for two days. This brought me to the Art of Hosting where you have these methods to have meaningful conversations, instead of 190 people listening to the three people in front of the room. So that led me to zooming in more on circle practice and deepening that practice into what I call now dialogue and Collective Presencing. I don’t think we have come to the end of the potential, there’s always more to discover.

Beth Tener:
Let’s go back to Art of Hosting for a minute. It’s not as popular in the US as in Europe and other places, so not everyone will have heard of that. Could you share a story of the early days since it’s now a global network and a whole suite of practices and way of meeting in groups? A lot of elements of it are integral in my work. You were one of the early ‘stewards’ we call it in some of the early days of that. Is that right?

Ria Baeck:
I was not the total beginning because it came from practitioners who either were familiar with World Cafe or some were familiar with Open Space technology, others were more into Circle Practice. They recognized that there was something that was binding them together and none of them would only stick to one. The other one was Future Search, I think. So 12 of them came together and they said “What is it that is underlaying all these different collective intelligence practices, you could call them?” And then they said, “actually, we are hosting meaningful conversations or conversations that matter.”

World Cafe, Open Space, Circle. They all have their specific application, when you would use them or when not to use them. But there’s an underlaying layer where they actually all have the same. It’s hosting the conversations. It’s not facilitating them. It’s not that the facilitator has a certain outcome in mind. It’s more like you help design a process and you help figure out what’s the inquiry here.

Beth Tener:
What’s the question?

Ria Baeck:
The question is easy to say “this is the problem.” But then it’s like, “okay, what is underneath that manifest problem? What is actually the question here?” And that’s part of the work of these hosting teams to actually figure out with the client, what is the question here? What are you actually bumping up against?

Beth Tener:
Getting to the right question, that is always the starting point for this kind of a gathering. And you know, we’re moving away from the professional expert top-down model, which is like “we have the answers” and it’s all about making a persuasive argument and messaging and imposing our solution to the vision and to the world. This is a very different orientation. I think of it often as Art of Hosting… we were like holding a container and we’re building that together to hold the group in the inquiry, but we show up not knowing, right?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. We hold the potential that the group can actually find their own answers or their own next steps. And trust that there is always more potential in individuals and in groups.

Beth Tener:
And in communities.
Given the theme of “what it means to feel at home here”, there’s a great article that I’ll put in the show notes that was written in summarizing Art of Hosting. The format of these gatherings where people are practicing and learning to host well are done over a three or four day time where the group is all together. A design team or hosting team that hosts and holds the space. Then there’s lots and lots of conversations and connections and good meals and time in nature. They’re just wonderful gatherings. One of my sad things about my life is that I live in New England where people are so busy. It’s really hard to get anyone ever to say we could take three or four days for something, which is one of my frustrations.

But anyway, in this article about an Art of Hosting held in Belgium that your colleague and friend Helen wrote, There was a story of a man who had come from the war in Syria as a refugee and found his way to the gathering. His quote was something like, “For months I have not felt safe.” In this gathering, where he didn’t know anybody, he randomly came to this with a friend. He said, this was the first time he felt safe. Do you remember that?

Ria Baeck:
It’s a pretty remarkable story because we wanted to do this three or four day hosting training and we decided we want to do also the meals ourselves. So we had a whole team for the kitchen. But we were like 50 or 60 people. So that was quite something. Then we were like, “hey, we would really need a real chef, a cook who can kind of understand what’s involved in cooking for dinners for that big group.” That was when all these refugees came into Europe, you probably see these images where they’re like streams of people coming from Syria and walking their way through Europe. One of us knew this guy from Syria and he was a chef and we invited him. He said yes and he came. He was a real chef. So he coordinated the whole kitchen, made of course this exquisite Syrian food.

Beth Tener:
What a gift.

Ria Baeck:
So he was not really in the training. But he was in this whole vibe of how we work. I think on the last day we interviewed him and that’s when, when he said that.

Beth Tener:
Wow. Beautiful story.
I’m curious about your discoveries through that time of the practice of hosting groups. What did you discover about how do you create that feeling of safety and human connection that allows people to come into good dialogue and have this patience and the spaciousness for something to emerge in this space? Like what allows that space to be created? Like trying to get very practical… what was important?

Ria Baeck:
As I said in the beginning, I’ve come more and more to the circle practice and the dialogue space and the specific dialogue style that we now call Collective Presencing. Whomever has the talking piece, this person speaks and the others listen. What we also say in our online spaces is, “we don’t cross the fire.” You are not saying, “Hey, what you just said, I don’t agree with that.” That’s what we don’t do. You are invited to speak, maybe whatever this person said might trigger in you, you can put that in the middle. That’s how we name it. You speak to the middle and you speak from the middle, if possible.

What this does is you do everything to get judgment out of the space. You invite everyone just to listen and witness. You give full attention to whatever people are saying, you might not agree with them or you might not understand where they’re coming from. We just let it sit and we witness. We witness stories of deep grief or parents have died or all kinds of stuff or ideas about where we go with the world and we witness with no judgment. I do think that is the biggest leverage. There’s something about accepting where I am at, accepting what you feel, what you think, and just let it all sit in the space.

Beth Tener:
Just for the individual to feel safe, where they can come out from feeling guarded, from feeling they have to perform, or they have to meet expectations or show up or not be teased or bullied.

I was in a yoga community for a long time where we were learning yoga to teach it and we had a rule about not giving advice. When you get in a space for a while where there’s no giving advice and there’s no crosstalk, we call it, you said “crossing the fire.” Like you’re sitting in a circle, everybody can speak and be heard and you don’t have to be prepared for the counter argument or the devil’s advocate, or any of that stuff. But I remember at one point when you got used to that field, you could expand and be in your not knowing and just be yourself so much more freely. At one point someone unconsciously started giving advice and you could feel how jarring it was in that moment. Right now in the States there can be a lot of this judging language in the dialogue spaces, especially with what words to use and not use and tied to identity. It brings us out of feeling the safety to actually speak and say, “I don’t know”, or “I think this, is that wrong.” You could feel it tense up everybody, right?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah, exactly. We just had one lady from Punjabi background, grew up second generation migrant in London. It was very strict how she was raised by her parents. She comes to this dialogue space every week and she’s like, “Oh my God, I can just speak here. I can just learn to speak. I can just learn to give how it is for me.” That’s where we said like: what is it in this space that actually gives people permission to be? I think then there comes a next layer is when you are present, you don’t need to think “what are they going to say?” Or “will I be attacked or ignored?” If that all can fall away and you just are present, that’s my question then what is possible?

Beth Tener:
Yes.

Ria Baeck:
If we then engage with the real question, what can we see? Otherwise, all the energies up in that energetic cramp and tension and emotional defense and whatever. But if we don’t need to go into fight, flight then the whole intelligence and attention and your sensing is open for something else.

Beth Tener:
Beautifully said. I’ll pick up something Bruce said last time, which is that our attention can go towards protection or it can go towards creativity. That’s exactly what you’re saying. I mean when you think of the design of capitalism, its scarcity, competition winner takes all, only a few are going to win. So you distrust everyone else. I mean it’s designed with the image of safety net. So where are we? If right underneath everybody’s a safety net? No one’s on the ground feeling secure. You just think of these pictures, right?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Beth Tener:
I was actually really intrigued. There’s this amazing book called the The Dawn of Everything where they’ve done the archeology and anthropology and trying to take the blinders of white supremacy off the eyes to say, “Wait, what was happening in North America before the colonists came?” One thing I was fascinated by was that a lot of the communities, it was natural to have some time of the year in hierarchy, right? When you’re, I don’t know if it was the hunting grounds or being ready, there would be hierarchy and we know Ria was the top and I’m going to honor her leadership.

Then at other times of the year, you’d switch back and you’d go to a different area and you’d switch back into more horizontal ways and then you’d go back and when you were going back and forth, like next time you might not be at the top. So you would have the impulse not to be a jerk, right? It was natural to toggle between these two ways of being. I’ve always said that to leaders, “yes, there’s hierarchy and we need hierarchy, but then we need this circle, this other networked, collaborative way of learning and discovering things to take the gems from that and back into getting it done.” Sometimes you need hierarchy. So I’d love your thoughts on that. The capacity to go between them is what we’re trying to build in some ways. Right?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. I was also impressed by reading that book also to understand that that whole linear idea of, “oh, and then at a certain point we invented agriculture and then hierarchies came into being because you have cities, and you need hierarchy.” Then that whole book says like “no, you don’t need hierarchy.” You can have huge agglomeration of people in the same spot, let’s say. They don’t seem to have any kings or queens, any signs that could think that there was hierarchy. I think that there’s a whole movement now of The 15 Minute City. We could need to go back to neighborhoods where everything is within 15 minutes of walking or biking. Back to the neighborhoods where you don’t need to drive half an hour to go to the supermarket but you have your shops nearby. So there seems to be a movement happening now to think about city development in that way.

Beth Tener:
I love it. It is also in-person community.

Ria Baeck:
Yeah, exactly.

Beth Tener:
So back on your story Ria, just to keep building on how it evolved. So you did all this work of Art of Hosting and people honing and developing those practices. Partly what I love in that community is there’s a really generous culture of harvest, where it’s like, “okay, we tried something and what worked and let’s record what we learned and document it and share it in art and other images, which is so beautiful. And share it generously.” They have a generous learning culture. Some of the people in that community, I’ve learned from their blogs and their writings for years and never met them in person, but they’ve been my teachers. I just love it.

Anything you want to say about that part of this “feeling at home in the questions together and the learning together?” Like learning as groups feels like part of what that way of being with change is.

Ria Baeck:
What I learned over time is that what makes a network alive is that there is collective learning happening. That’s the glue and the relationships are in support of that. You build relationships because you say, “yeah, I have that question too. Like how do you actually do that? How did you do it and how did I do it? And can we compare notes?” And I’ve seen it more and more that if our goal is to collectively learn something that’s the networks or the communities or the networks that keep on going. Open Source was always the DNA of the Art of Hosting network. We want other people to learn the same and if you come to the training, you get everything if you want. We are not serving you everything up, but if you want to look for it, it’s all there. You can ask for help, you can ask for co-hosts, anything is possible.

Beth Tener:
And you built in a nice pattern of stewards, who’ve done it a lot. Was it apprentices who would be joining the hosting team to get to practice by doing?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah.

Beth Tener:
Some beautiful models there. And I love what you were saying about the learning. A lot of my work in collaborative networks is working for social change. I come in and I have to go up against this urgent action doing of “we’re just talking and not getting to action,” or “we’re wasting our time and no one’s going to stay with the process if we’re not getting to action by the second meeting.” That kind of mentality.

I have a picture, I’ll put it in the show notes, of like a foundation of a triangle. The bottom is the foundation of trusting relationships. Then the whole middle part is on listening and learning together and then aligning work. I have like five different bullets of what you have to do there before action at the top. So I’m like, “if you just want to go from today to action, you’re missing the point.”

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. At one point in time I said like, we don’t have time anymore to do it quickly.
That’s what we’ve done in the seventies, eighties, and yeah. We can do this and we can do that. Or we can build dams and we can, and then 50 years later we see like, oh, we better break the dams…

Beth Tener:
Take the dams out, you mean?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah ,so that the whole ecosystem can restore. So I would rather go slow, but with every inch of myself feeling like this is the right step instead of rushing to action. Because there will be quite some things that will collapse, but there’s so much unintended consequences for when we go too quickly.

Beth Tener:
I agree. When I was creating Kinship, I said, Mark Zuckerberg’s all about “go fast and break things, right?” Disruptive innovation. I said, “I want to go slow and grow things.”

Ria Baeck:
Exactly.

Beth Tener:
I was just thinking yesterday, it’s so important. We work on things and we’re urgent about it, but then we need some long meetings. That if we can do one thing: have longer meetings, that’s my mantra. I’m watching people try to do complex collaboration and literally they just say, “can we do it in an hour and a half meeting once a month for a year?” I respond with “could we go away for three or four days together? I guarantee you, we will then be changing the system in that meeting because we are changing relationships and flows and mindsets and values and practice.”

Ria Baeck:
Exactly.

Beth Tener:
Hour and a half meeting with some PowerPoints and you barely get your coffee. Okay, we got to go. What are the next steps?

Ria Baeck:
It’s not going to happen. Because it is how the current system operates. And you can never invent the new with the tools of the old. How would that ever be possible? It’s not possible. Like so many of these activists say, “Yeah, we need to do something and urgently.” I mean, there is some real stuff that’s going to happen and is happening already. Maybe not so much in Belgium and in the US but there’s tons of places on the globe where people are already sinking and losing their ground to floods. The fires… yes. But can we be sure that whatever is the thing we do, that it actually has no consequences down the line. That 20 or 50 years from now, we say like, ”Oh my God, we didn’t know.”

Beth Tener:
We just created a new problem.
So the ways that we host the conversations, what we see is so problematic is that we don’t have the whole system in the room. We don’t have enough perspectives in the conversation. We have these people thinking “this is a great solution” who are blind to the consequences because other people could see them but they don’t take the time to engage and ask them enough. Right? So we just keep doing the same problem.

Let’s come back to what we talked about earlier: when things are safe enough with a group.
You were doing Art of Hosting and then really realizing the power of the circle practice sitting in circle and that deep listening practice and then going towards the edge of learning, asking what’s possible?

My friend Bruce says we all have this capacity to be present and to sense what’s happening and then he says “Nice! I wanna go play with a band!” But I say “No… now I have to go back and teach other people who don’t know how to do this meditation thing to do it!” But he just says “No, let’s go play with the band together! What can we do?”

So what can you go into like the, I think that moved you into women moving the edge and discovering Collective Presencing. Can you tell us that kind of part of the story?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. It was actually in some of these Art of Hosting or World Cafe gatherings… when you sit in circles for long enough you could sometimes feel that the energy shifts. And at that point in time, we called it the “magic in the middle” because you were like, what is this?
Beth Tener:
Something’s happening.

Ria Baeck:
Something’s happening, but what and why? That led me on the quest actually of “what are the conditions that you can actually make this happen more often and not just let it happen happenstance.”

Beth Tener:
There’s your learning inquiry question. I love that.

Ria Baeck:
Exactly. And also the question about what I learned in Art of Hosting was holding space. Every facilitator nods their heads. But what is it? What is holding space? What do you do? What is that? What don’t you do?

It’s actually like when you have a kid and it’s two years old, four years old, six-year-old, you don’t know, will they be good at math or do they like sports or do they like music? You don’t know. There’s a whole potential that still has to come out. But as parents, you have to hold the container, kind of hold the space so that the potential can find its way, whatever it is. That’s what I learned.

What we do in holding space, holding the container is actually like this group of people around this question. There is a potential that hasn’t come true, that hasn’t manifested, but that we can actually hold for whatever that means energetically. The less judgment there is and the more presence there is and the more safety there is, it will come forward or will try to find its way.

Beth Tener:
So you were sitting with your inquiry question when you went from Art of Hosting to the next phases of where your journey took you towards Women Moving the Edge or Collective Presencing. You were sitting with a question of, “okay, what allows that magic in the middle, that group shift coherence to happen?” So where did you go from there?

Ria Baeck:
We had a gathering at one point in Denmark. After that it was very funny because we had the hosting team, and at a certain point in that gathering, the hosting team said, we don’t know how to do this anymore. So there’s no structure. In the afternoon, some people went walking, and let’s say half of the people were sitting in circle having a circle practice. The group came back from a walk and some other people came back from the rooms. And that was when it happened.

Beth Tener:
Can’t predict it. Right?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. And in another instance of that gathering was we were trying to, to find a methodology to make it happen. And there were all kinds of proposals, like we could do this and we could do that!

Beth Tener:
Oh, I’ve been there. Everyone’s got the answer.

Ria Baeck:
But nothing happens. And then we were in this Danish seminar center and they would bring a trolley with coffee and tea and pastries. So the trolley was sitting there and at a certain point somebody got up, they didn’t announce it, they didn’t ask permission, they didn’t check with others. Suddenly everybody got up and the break happened. That for me was like, this is collective intelligence. Nobody needs approval. Nobody needs permission. Nobody has to say anything. We all feel now it’s the break. That was a big learning for me.

After that gathering, we chewed on that one. We had a debrief afterwards and we said like, yeah, but there was so much conceptual thinking, because there were quite a lot of men. And then we said, what if we would do that with women only? And so that’s where the project Women Moving the Edge came from. And so we did that.

Beth Tener:
You created intentional gatherings with women.

Ria Baeck:
With women and always with some of these very deep questions. I think we did 13 gatherings over seven years or something. Then that eventually led to me writing the book from all these blog posts and all these prep calls we had, which then was still on Skype. And we made transcripts of all these calls.

Beth Tener:
Digesting what did we do? what happened? It’s action research material, should I call it? Doing it and learning as we go.

Ria Baeck:
And every time a new question came out of the previous one. So that eventually led to Collective Presencing as a practice.

Beth Tener:
Ria has a whole book that online that you can download and make a donation.
I have a quote from your book about this. You describe it as an “emerging human capacity,” this idea of Collective Presencing. “It will help us create in and from complexity, perhaps even chaos and collapse. It will call forth from us a new way of being and doing, and that our center of gravity will shift from ‘I’ being an individual human being to human collectives aligned with life all around.”

You are showing up in service as part of the collective. I loved the way you talked about that. As you hear in these all these stories, when bringing a group together, asking “what is our big question?” Then these simple practices of listening in circle and then moving into other ways of being and learning and sensing things, and then we get answers. I’d love you to talk a little more of how you think of Collective Presence. Can you help us understand what it looks like or what it is?

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. I do think it’s a new capacity or a combination of things. If you think about it… a long time ago we were on the Savannah somewhere in Africa. The tribe was a collective probably. But there was not much of an identity in people.

Beth Tener:
For the individual.

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. There’s still a few languages who don’t have any words for “I” because they’re so in the collective. What I see as far as we’ve evolved is we have a lot of individuation, but a bit too far out. Now it’s all about individualism and we have lost the relationship with each other, with nature. I mean, I don’t have to spell that out, we all know that. But how can we use the deep individuation as in “I am unique and I’m different than you?” What I have to bring into a collective is something else. And what you bring is too. But we all need every voice and can we be aware because it’s mainly awareness and consciousness about expanding our center of gravity. Not in this unique voice, but how my uniqueness is actually embedded in this group of people, in this collective for this question.

That you actually see a kind of a jigsaw puzzle comes close to describing it. But it’s not a picture that we know from the start. It’s more like, you have a piece, I have a piece. More people have other pieces of that puzzle and suddenly we see something arising in the middle.

Beth Tener:
To me, that’s my favorite kind of space to be in. I agree, it’s not a puzzle. You know, we sometimes use the elephant and we all see sides of it, but it’s not that fixed. It’s a dance. I think of that gathering we all created in Florida and we spent a lot of time around, “what’s our question?” “How do we create spaces for collective healing to happen?” Our team was so coherent. We were sharing our curiosity of that vision.

Then when we went to actually put on the event, I felt like “I actually have a lot of people I’ll work on inviting people”, you know? And then someone else had energy around getting the website. And then also even in the circle dialogue. I spent a lot of years doing emotional body work, whatever you call that, and just at the right moment in where the dialogue’s going, you bring in a case study from that world or a phrase that’s so common in the child education field that gets brought into the middle and then the group pops and evolves. So that’s what it could feel like. On the other side of these rigid, unsafe, over-structured spaces where we listen to keynote speakers.

Ria Baeck:
It’s that feeling of flow, of naturalness… almost like nobody needs to hold back and nobody takes over from somebody else. But there is indeed… a dance is probably what comes closest. We are all in service of that bigger, emergent quality. And it’s difficult to describe. Sometimes it’s difficult to get into words because you’re dancing in complexity and so there’s no linearity to it.

Beth Tener:
Yes.

Ria Baeck:
In the end, you only have your own sensing capacity to ask, “am I aligned? Am I coherent in myself? Am I congruent in myself? How I feel and what I speak and am I coherent with the rest so the people kind of understand me and I can sense where they are.” So basically you come into a flow state and in the circle practice you use words. It’s not the flow state of a brass ensemble or something. They just use music. But the big trouble is when we start using language, then there’s lots of constraints and identity stuff is linked with it.

Beth Tener:
So coming back to the theme of “what it means to feel at home here.” The theme of the Living Love podcast is really “for those ready, who want to be building more human connection and bring us out of fear and separation…” let’s not just talk theory.

My question, Ria, would be, so if you’re an individual in a workplace or a community, a neighborhood, a family, how could you start? Some of the stories are wonderful where you get a bunch of amazing people who are ready to go off for three days and can figure out a retreat space and all that. But like, how could you start a little? We talked last week about the Pocket Project in the last episode of “let’s start pockets of it, little places where we’re growing this way of being and practicing.” And I was thinking maybe even about the European Commission work with Art of Hosting. Wasn’t there like a little pod of people trying it? Can you give us some stories just to make it feel like it’s something any of us can start doing?

Ria Baeck:
I would say learn to use circle practice. I mean, and there’s tons of resources on the web, the Circle Way is a very good resource. The Way of Council, that’s where I learned circle practice. And in essence, it’s so simple. You have an invitation, either have a question or a team, and you do the circle and you use a talking piece. So there’s no discussion, there’s no arguments. But just speaking, sharing, listening. Even if you do that every two weeks with a group of people, I can assure you if you do that over time, it is a practice. We need to train our muscle because we are so trained in arguments, some kind of debate like I have to win or you are right or I’m right and then you are wrong.

Circle practice is: I have my perspective and there are other perspectives. And wow, that’s like a diamond… instead of I win, or you win, just simply start a circle practice. We have somebody who was in the Collective Presencing core group, and he worked in an IT company in Australia. What they did on Friday afternoon, I think they called it Council. So it was not strategic, not operational, just sensing what is happening in the company, what’s happening in the world, kind of just sharing.

That could also be an opportunity, you know, to sense that you actually learn from that kind of sharing, and it doesn’t need to be operational or goal oriented… I mean in the end it is, but it’s not in a straight line.

Beth Tener:
Yeah. I think the current system trips us up. I work a lot these days in the nonprofit and some government, so there’s always like, “can we get a grant for that? And we have to like take everything we’re doing and shaping it into a discrete project that we can get funded that will start now.” Then government has this program and we’re going to do all this work to build a collaborative table. But then the grant’s going to run out because we didn’t fund this right, and then it’s over. I love the simplicity of this, which is we’re just going to have a regular meeting where we meet over this question and those who are drawn to the inquiry: Come.

You have a quote “What if it’s easy? Could it be that easy?”

Ria Baeck:
Yeah. What if it’s easy? It’s not so simple a 2-year-old can do it, but there’s some ease in a next step to take. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Doesn’t need a grant… you can just take one step at a time.

Beth Tener:
I was in a meeting last week with a new collaborative where a lot of executive directors of social service agencies in the same community are starting to want to work together. I opened it trying to have a different way of talking about what changing systems means. I had a drawing of a system, a circle with people outside it, pointing at it being like, we’re going to intervene in the system and how do we change the system? Which is the picture in our minds.

I drew a circle and I put all the little people in it. I’m like, we are the system, and the thing that changes systems is flows of relationships and communication between elements of the system and mindsets and values and the patterns and structures. So all those things are things we could do differently. By the end of the meeting, we did all this time thinking about what the current dynamics and everything were, and then I put this question in the middle, I said, “what is the most important conversation we are not having?” This is one of my favorite questions. Where we got to is “We need to sit, have a conversation with the funders who are driving the system and all of these short term grants based on what they think is needed. It’s not at all what we see is needed.” I was just saying to them, you can have that conversation. That is not hard to do. We can host that conversation and that’s changing systems. We don’t need a five year grant. We can just invite people to a conversation held well, right?

Ria Baeck:
Exactly. Totally. You were just pointing to working in the European Commission and whenever that work started, I was very aware that my work is not going to change how the European Commission works. It is a beast. I mean it’s huge, but I can probably impact some people with what I do. Even if they learn circle practice and are going to use them in the street they live, and not in European Commission. That’s fine to me. After all these years it’s still going. It’s still working. It’s just to say like you never know where the ripples are going from what you do.

Beth Tener:
Yes.

Ria Baeck:
There’s no straight line. How many years ago was it that we met?

Beth Tener:
Yeah, and that is interesting. The logo for Kinship… I made it to look like a water drop with ripples because that’s exactly it. The circle at the center is going to ripple in so many ways. You can’t predict.

We’re coming to the end of our time. We could go on. But this has been a delight.

Beth Tener:
Thank you, Ria, for sharing your wisdom and experience with me in conversation today. And I hope the ripples will go far and wide with those that hear it.
If people wanted to follow your work or learn more about it, what would you suggest?

Ria Baeck:
These days I would invite people to the website of Collective Presencing. We do these regular practice dialogue sessions on Zoom every week. There’s a newsletter that you can follow that is only sent out whenever we have something to say, so it’ll not clog your system. It’s only every month or every two months or something. These days I’m more on LinkedIn than on Facebook.

Beth Tener:
Okay. Alright. Well thank you very much!

Ria Baeck:
You are welcome.

Beth Tener:
Thanks for listening today. As a reminder, if you’d like to see the transcript from our conversation or any links to books and resources and Ria’s website and book, those are all in the show notes at kinshiphub.net/podcast.

A preview for next episode, episode 3. I’m excited to bring in Emily Daniels of the Regulated Classroom. Emily is someone who is a school counselor and really was getting frustrated seeing the level of mental health and academic challenges that students were going through. She’s taking the trauma-informed research, the resilience, the social engagement, understanding what I’ve been talking about with Bruce and Ria, and she translated that into a program called the Regulated Classroom. It’s all about giving teachers the tools and the practices and the capacities to create really great environments of social engagement in the classroom so that kids can feel at home and be learning, and everyone can be working with the stress that they have. She has a great story to tell and she’s like putting it into practical application. I think it’s going to be a wonderful conversation next time with Emily about classrooms where everybody can feel at home.
I hope you’ll join us.