Back in 2018 I was working with a civil society organisation in South Africa with more than 5000 active members. This is by far the largest community of practice I’ve worked with yet. This is an attempt to try and understand how pluralism can sit within communities of practices.
I was supporting the organisation with visual harvesting of their leadership trainings. During my scribing, the founder of the organisation came to me and said something along the lines of: “it’s movements instead of movement” and I thought she was spellchecking my work. I was rather annoyed about that “insignificant” mistake compared to the amount of time that I then spent on talking to her instead of listening to the room and thought we could have corrected that later - if really needed.
However, this turned out to be anything else than an insignificant typo. For years this organisation had run into tensions around definitions and being on the same page. Frustrations around not working “on the same thing”. By adding the ‘s’ to movement, their work immediately became pluralistic in its nature. The role of them as facilitators, became orchestrating movements within the movement, rather than fitting 5000 peoples work into one box. The relief dancing through that room with that realisation was significant. Suddenly there was spaciousness to be individuals with hopes and dreams within a community, rather than the community trying to “convince” individuals into the same path towards a shared vision or goal. Understanding that the challenges in Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal regions might be similar, but the solutions and the agency can looks very different, even when we are working towards the same bold visions of the future.
“The quality or condition of being plural, or of existing in more than one part or form.” - one definition of pluralism
We need as facilitators to be trusting that putting out a vision will mean that a diversity of people will show up to do the work, but we can not and should not try and conform it into one thing. We can do everything we can to put together the tools, resources and beginning to weave and connect the people who need to share space at certain moments in time for the movement to be alive and flourishing.
“Pluralism is an interpretation of social diversity. It can be rendered as a cultural, political, or philosophical stance. In any of these versions, pluralism offers an account of social interaction understood as an interplay of conflicting and competing positions that cannot be seamlessly reduced to one another, ranked in one single order permanently, or reduced to a single institutional arrangement. Any kind of pluralism (cultural, political, or philosophical) presupposes at the very least an empirical thesis about irreducible diversity. Social diversity, from the pluralist perspective, does not go away. Yet each of these kinds of pluralism pivots around different types of conflict – including ethical values, social or cultural practices, epistemological world views and/or political interests – and each accounts for these clashes from a different angle and with different implications.” - https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/cyumatle/files/c.yumatle-pluralism.pdf
Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge no 1
One dynamic I’ve observed in all communities of practices I’ve been part of this last decade, is that a tension arises when the dance between the individual and the collective dreams gets out of flow. Some of us enter a community of practice dreaming to connect with other people doing similar as ourselves, with the intention of bringing that knowledge back to our workplaces/communities. Some of us enter with the hope of co-creating something new to offer to the world, together. In fact, this dynamic might have explained 90%+ of our tensions during my 3 year education at the Kaospilots.
My guess right now is, that if we learn how to embrace pluralism and allowing movements within a movement, then there’s space for both individualism and collectivism*,* because we can intentionally design spaces that allows these seemingly contradictions to co-exist.
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/developing-leaders-team-grows-big/