When we are on a journey to our desired state and dream, it may happen to fall into a state called “CRASH state”.

In generative change, CRASH is an acronym that stands for C= Contracted, R= Reactive, A = Analysis Paralysis, S = Separation, H= Hostility, Hurt or Hatred

The feelings of contraction, disconnection, reactivity and hostility, or hurt may come on our way at a certain moment, and we often reach out to the mind for an analytical perspective and a rational solution to what is challenging us. When we confront a challenge from the CRASH state, we may also perceive it as an unsolvable or impossible problem.

We tend to gracelessly get rid of the CRASH state: it is an impediment and we want to proceed fast and without obstacles disturbing and distracting us on our beautiful journey.

Surprisingly enough, however, the CRASH state is an ambassador of unexpected, unpredictable messages about our need to integrate a new resource into the journey. Like a three-legged stool would fall on one side if a leg is missing, we may fall in a CRASH state as we miss the support of a crucial resource needed at that moment of the journey.

It may be interesting (though not easy) to welcome the CRASH ambassador and open a space to listen to the often astonishing news she is bringing to us. More often than not, the news is about a missing resource knocking at our door willing to be listened to, to be integrated, and above all, to contribute actively in our journey.

It may happen also that one missing resource is tightly linked to other missing or weakly-developed resources. The integration of a single new resource may actually invite and activate a number of closely linked resources, that is a cluster of resources.

In one of my experiences with a coachee, I could attend how she strongly felt the call to integrate a deep sense of care and caring as a fundamental attitude to continue her journey in a generative way. Interestingly enough, soon after that special attention to care and caring was activated, resourceful capacities emerged spontaneously and were activated in the process: for instance her inner capacity of advocacy was enhanced and her ability to set healthy borders in the relationship with others became much sharper. These specific capacities were diverse, unforeseen manifestation of deeper care and caring.

When we fall into a CRASH state, we may welcome the positive intention of this state AND ask ourselves: What is the message of this ambassador? What is the missing resource she is willing to bring into my journey right now?

It may happen that we are not able to answer this question immediately. That we do not see what is missing. It is out of our view, our perception, our tangible feeling. How do we do then?

The first step, welcoming the CRASH, is probably the most difficult one. Yet it is a crucial step. We can say to ourselves: I don’t know what this is about, but for sure it has its own reason to be and to manifest right now, it makes sense, it has a meaning.

This is an exercise of deep trust in our own healthy system.

The welcoming can last some time: the deeper the CRASH, the more compassionate, patient and embracing the welcoming, and the holding of it.

I deeply believe that the missing resource is secretly held in our initial intention, in our desired state. In other words, our desired state invites, calls the missing resource(s), in a way we may not be totally aware of.

Then the generative journey toward our desired state becomes a journey of integration of new, nourishing, enriching, and supporting resources, with a consequent expansion of our identity and the authentic creation of something totally original and unpredictable, inside and outside us.

Resources are the incredible potential for a system to function, grow, and flourish into his wholeness.

Identifying the resources, seeing the resources, and bring them on board is at the core of the generative change. A desired state may be often the healthy expression of an ecological willingness to integrating a new resource. Resources are always available inside and outside us, in our own system and in connection to the bigger system we are in.

The matter is: do we see them? Do we recognise them? Do we connect to them? Do we bring them on board in a conscious and creative way?

Sometimes, finding back and uncovering a resource requires to stop breathing and dive into an underwater world. It is rescuing something that was left on the seabed.

Sometimes it requires us to go to the balcony and see the entire panorama, have the entire view from a distance and see all that is contained there and we do not see when we are “downstairs”, as a part of the panorama.

Other times it requires to see the all richest forest full of different trees, plants, and living forms instead of focusing and being obsessed by one single type of tree.

These are indeed the possible characteristics of re-sourcing: diving down, looking from a distance, identifying a new form, in order to integrate the missing part that would make the all system growing in an ecological and generative way. Living systems are able to self-sustain themselves in order to learn and thus thrive.

On the journey to our desired state it is crucial then to continuously ask ourselves: what are the resources I can awaken and connect to, that can help and support me in the realisation of my dream and my desire?

A picture from Story of Flowers

A fascinating etymological history

The term generativity was introduced for the first time by Erik Erikson to indicate the stage of care in his theory of human development, the aspiration and the need to leave a legacy for the future generations, in contrast to a state of stagnation. Erikson relates generativity to “making our mark” on the world through creating or nurturing things that will outlast ourselves and will be beneficial for the next generation.

Generativity and generation have indeed the same etymological root, common also to words like genius, gene, …: they derive from the Greek-Latin root gen, which relates to birth, origin.

If we go even more back in the history of this linguistic root to Sanskrit, we find the root j-a-n. Fascinated, I discovered that j means “motion that allows advancing” and a-n means “animating breath of the waters”. (1)

In particular, our Indo-Europeans ancestors have joined the two consonants j = motion ahead and n= water with the vowel a=effect of action, completion, while constructing their language from spiritual beliefs and tangible experience. Impressively, from the same 3 sounds-symbols, they constructed also another root, j-n-a, which means “to know”. (1)

“To generate” and “to know” have the same ancient elementary nuclei of sounds and symbols, both being archetypically connected to divine waters, movement ahead, action, learning, and completion.

Generativity and Creativity

In the root “gen” lays an essential notion of creativity, in a way that comprehends two basic steps of creativity connected by an act of motion. The first step is diving into the water, finding a place that is more profound and more open, tapping into the world of the infinity possibilities (the divine waters). The second step is moving ahead, having a direction.  The two steps being joined by the connecting-transitional element of bringing out, taking out from the invisible, inside world into the tangible, outside world.

These are also the two crucial steps both in the process of Generative Change by Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan (2) and in the Theory U framework of deep change (3).

The presence of the divine, cosmic waters refers to what in Generative Change is called “the creative unconscious”; and in Theory U “the source”. The movement ahead is what in Generative Change is named “desired state” and in Theory U “intention”.  The three elements integrated into the root “gen” fundamentally constitute a unique relationship and create a conscious connection between the world of infinite possibilities (the water)  and the idea of moving ahead through mindful, conscious action. It is the link between an inner, unshaped world to a shaped, defined, world; the link between the source of everything and the future emerging and taking a shape.

I find it fascinating that both these processes, developed as technologies for deep change and creativity, contained fully integrated the core of the first intuition and perception of our ancestors, at the ancestral moment of constructing a language from their spiritual beliefs and experience of the world.

The essential U-process

     

The essentials of generative-change

Linear representations of the U process and the generative-change process. Both are generative, ecological, and systemic (complex).

Generativity and Emergence

In Generative Change, we talk about a continuous conversation between the creative unconscious and the tangible world. Like for any authentic conversation, the essential condition is to be present, open, attentive, connected, welcoming what emerges. A conversation that has a direction, but not a destination (cit. Robert Dilts, in Generative Coaching). Similarly in Theory U, the generative listening at the source level is about embracing the unknown and attending the very new we cannot foresee nor imagine.

The process of generativity is essentially an open-end process.

It involves ceaseless creation and interaction while attending and holding the complex phenomenon of emergence, the unfolding from within.

Generativity and Ecology

Accordingly, generativity is inherently ecological. It primarily makes space and welcomes what needs to emerge for a system to continue to learn, grow, and prosper. It is about the process of new parts of the system becoming visible and being integrated for the system to thrive while being embedded in a bigger system.

It is about creating and interacting from a deep place, from “the pattern that connects” (4), that takes care and sustains primary connections and relations. And, then it is about giving birth to a unique shape, so to create “the difference that makes the difference” (4).

Finally, it is about offering our unique contribution to the world while sustaining relations and unleashing new forms, for expanding and enriching life and creating abundance.

(1) Franco Rendich, Dizionario etimologico comparato delle lingue classiche indoeuropee

(2) Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts, The Hero’s Journey

(3) Otto Scharmer, Theory U

(4) http://www.naturearteducation.org/AnEcologyOfMind.htm, a movie about the thought of Gregory Bateson

photo by ©Carlètto Del Monaco

Recently, the power of narrative attracts more attention in learning and transforming individuals, teams, and communities.

Why is a narrative mindset so crucial in this time of complex challenges? How is it related to our capacity for creating meaning, overcoming paradoxes and living in uncertainty?

My experience

Like all humans, I am not satisfied with just existing in this world. I continuously ask myself the questions “Why am I here? What am I doing here? What am I gonna do?”

We, humans, are meaning-seeking creatures.

I am trained as a physicist and worked as a scientist for more than a decade in the field of nanotechnology. Although the field I was working on is considered very “advanced”, I experienced a full immersion in the old, mechanistic paradigm, vastly extended in and beyond the disciplines of science and technology, to the organizational structure and the stakeholders’ system in the sector.

I found myself included as “a small piece in a machine” and, simultaneously, I was excluded from the same machine as its direction and purpose were dropped from above. In fact, as a scientist, I felt that I was subtly and implicitly requested to become an executor, with (now I know) very misleading messages about “participating” in a profound innovation. 

Technology has its own roadmap without necessarily connecting to human motive and purpose. So for a while, I was torn between the good feeling of contributing to scientific and technological advances and much deeper sensing that something fundamental was missing in the discourse.

Until the time came for me to leave in search of the lost piece.

Two modes of thought

Among many thinkers that illuminate my path during this searching journey, I got fascinated by the work of cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner on narrative thought. (1)
Bruner distinguishes between logico-scientific thought and narrative thought. These two ways of thinking do not exclude each other, they are complementary, and we do need both.

During the last centuries of human history however, the narrative thought has been progressively undermined, if not silenced, to give abnormous, unbalanced space to the logico-scientific mode of thinking.
The table below reports some characteristics of the two thinking modes.

Limits of the Logico-scientific thought	Benefits of the Narrative thought
Imperfect generalizations	Contextuality and reflexivity
Tacit justification	Expression of purpose and motive
Rigid consistency	Temporal sensitivity
Non-contradiction	Unpredictability and paradox

Imperfect Generalizations vs Contextuality and reflexivity

The logico-scientific mode operates by generalization, and by applying “universally true” conditions. Any phenomenon (eg, event, entity or “problem”) is abstracted from context and the knowledge is organized in definitions and categories. The narrative thought, conversely, is sensitive to the situational particularity and therefore provides the necessary condition for meaning creation. As Gregory Bateson said, without context, there is no meaning. (2)

Tacit justification vs Expression of purposes and motives

The narrative mode of thinking constantly reminds us that behind a story there is a storyteller, behind a narrative, a narrator.
It connects significantly to our own specific experience and engages our imaginative and creative capacity toward making meaning of it. It seeks universal understanding grounded in our personal motives and purposes. It is therefore meaningful and heartful.
This primarily means that an outcome is not a logical necessity, it does not possess a top-down truth. The fact that an event is considered an instance of general law is called ‘tacit justification’.
Within the narrative mindset, we talk about “choice”, “perspective”, in the logico-scientific mindset we talk about “necessity”.

Rigid time consistency vs Temporal sensitivity

Logico-scientific thought is also timeless. What is true now, it will be true tomorrow. The same event today or tomorrow has the same significance. That is very different in a narration where every event localized in time has his own peculiar significance. Further, the narrative mode seeks to connect apparently non-related events into a meaningful whole. A crucial feature of this thinking mode is forging the links between exceptional and ordinary events. The laser power of the moment, the transformation that happens in an imperceptible instant.

Non-contradiction vs Unpredictability

The logico-scientific mindset derives his own reason from pre-established logic rules. Every anomaly, uncertainty, contradiction is a problem, while narrative readily incorporates them into unfolding stories. It is often from the unpredictable, the paradox, the conventionally called “irrational”, that the narrative creates new meaning.

Narrative, meaning, and complexity

Remarkably, the principles and values of the New Science (modern physics and biology), such as uncertainty, chaos, paradox, self-organization, relational field, resonate with the narrative view. Narrating provides thus a mental landscape and a tool to overcome a paradigm rooted in seventeenth-century science and still very alive today.
At this very moment in human history, we are dramatically experiencing the limitations and the consequences of an overall dominating logico-scientific paradigm. The narrative mind opens the landscape of a new level of consciousness, linked to the emerging perception of the complexity of the world.

From observer-scientist to participant-narrator: a transformational journey

Personally, I dived into the limits of the logico-scientific thought that contributed to my disconnection from a deeper personal motive and from the participation to an authentic collective purpose.
I experience narrative as an invitation to reconnect deeply to ourselves, to our rich context and to our unique, significant experiences. It allows the unique voice inside us to emerge, our authentic story to naturally unfold, our profound participation in Life to take place from below and from within. (3) It is a mindset for grasping complexity, as it does not offer a unique answer, but opens the space to construct multiple worlds. Narrative accesses complexity and our capacity of making meaning of it.

In my journey in search of the lost piece, I experienced a profound shift from being an observer-scientist to become a participant-narrator. This has primarily restored in me a deep connection to a sense of the whole in Life. Acquiring a narrative mindset is inherently transformational.

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1. J. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
2. G. Bateson, Mind and Nature
3. C. Swart, Re-Authoring the World