#117 The Age of Thrivability with Michelle Holliday

Let's talk Transformation : The business leaders podcast

"we need to think of conversations as living systems...this mechanistic story is so all pervasive that we don't even recognise it... "

A brilliant conversation with Michelle on creating sustainable conditions for people & living systems to thrive. Michelle offers a refreshing and transformative perspective of thrivability. This concept redefines how communities and businesses operate by viewing them as dynamic, interconnected living systems. We discuss moving beyond the mechanistic approaches and the leadership paradigms that support this, and us embracing a more holistic vision rooted in collaboration, diversity, and shared purpose.

This of course asks for different leadership skills and the intention to create practice grounds where individuals and teams can hone these skills. We delve into the wealth of wisdom in indigenous cultures, and within our selves as we walk through the spiral of conversations as living systems. At each stage we can look at new habits, thinking and feeling. Never have organisations been more in need of cultivating and nourishing the human elements of systems and practition-ing sustainable change to a more inclusive and collaborative way of working.

How can we all channel our personal agency to create cultures where we collaborate and care and not compete and compare ?

How do we create regenerative and intentional practice to build Thrivability and competitive advantage ? A platform for world change..

Listen here to find out more as Michelle generously shares her research, experience and models form working with individuals and organisations all over the globe.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

- Brand strategy, international marketing and organisational development are all characterised by a lack of relationships with customers, a lack of purpose, and a fiercely competitive internal culture.

- Research into sustainability involved looking into the notion that everything operates as a machine, separate from each other and nature, and exploring biology to see if the facts of being alive apply to communities and organisations.

- Went on to develop frameworks that have now been in use for over 25 years based on living systems, survival of the fittest, an adaptive capacity for change, a holistic view of systems, and the wisdom of natural living systems.

- The four patterns of thrivability – diversity, nourishment, learning, emergence – have significance for us as individuals and collectively; organisations are seen as separate from us and static, but we must see everything as part of a living, dynamic world.

- Thrivability is an informed intention and practice to enable life to thrive - living and participating enable the setting of an intention whilst being informed enables life to thrive, drawing on indigenous wisdom, intuition, poetry, spirituality, biology, etc.

- Organisations as living systems must invite diversity in relationship and flow, enabling the emergence of a new whole beyond the level of the parts – this shared purpose then acts like a magnet to bring parts together.

- Mechanical systems have no capacity for innovation, healing, regeneration, reaction to change, or spark of life - we are the gardeners who cultivate life, without necessarily knowing what we are growing.

- Collective intelligence is about the integration of diverse parts, moving from ‘compete and compare’ to ‘collaborate and compare’, which is a profound and revolutionary shift in terms of social context.

- The starting point is being aware of the wholeness of the present moment, then relationality, then belonging in relationships, then individuation, etc.; society should integrate all these aspects (cf. Eastern/indigenous traditions).

- We can design for integration by tending to relationships, which produces better results, tapping into the wisdom of the whole to find a deeper level of intention, and holding multiple perspectives for a different collective result.

- Conversations in living systems require constructive, generative, healing exchanges to allow for inspiration and the energy of life to permit thrivability – we must overcome fear and division to navigate diversity and complexity to create a wiser, more peaceful society.

- Participatory processes nourish all gifts during a process, listen to the voice of the whole, and foster engagement to produce a positive end result – a shared vision and purpose remove competition and ultimately offer scope for greater impact on the world.

- Thrivability is based on a ‘spiral’ of core ongoing, iterative practices, with the core defined as being alive, then aspects such as:

· stewardship (reverence and responsibility)

· new ways of doing, being and seeing (e.g. Art of Hosting leadership movement)

· tuning into the intelligence of the system

· discovering new ways of serving

· safe, native action as the next natural step in the system

- The tenets of sociocracy, i.e. look for what is good enough for now and safe enough to try, are a good approach to action, as are new ways of sensing, learning and evolving.

- It is tricky to prove how it will work and measure if it has worked. Peter Block’s book, The Answer to How is Yes, posits that ‘how’ is a defence against action, the barrier we create - there are no guarantees, but we can make it good enough.

- There is value in monitoring it for it to have a (re)generative effect in itself: Who should notice? Who makes sense of the data? Who receives and responds to the data? It creates more capacity (for life) in the system.

- Operationalising the model means practicing regeneration as a foundation for thrivability:

1. Practice and support for new stories and a new language

2. Methods with practical frameworks and tools around convening

3. Clear attention to demonstrating value

4. Community of others for shared learning for nourishment

- This is intended for all changemakers/leaders at any level in the role of steward - ‘developmental evaluation’ allows us to rethink measurement and resource each other so that we are informed, clear on the intention and commit to a life practice of thrivability.

Find out more about Michelle and her work here :

https://www.thrivableworld.com/