Enquiry #1: What Might We Become Attuned To If We Troubled Organisational Purpose?

This enquiry is the first in a new series that is just for CR’s paying subscribers (no free trial access). Alongside the longer form articles that I post every month or two that I craft with care over many months, these enquiries will be shorter, looser, less crafted explorations of some of the enquiries that I’m currently holding.

I hope this series will be a living invitation to you to join me in shared enquiry since shared enquiry is one of my favourite ways of being. It will also be an experiment in bringing ecological enquiry, the shared enquiry process I’ve been developing over the last few years, onto paper. (Which may well be impossible!)

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Enquiry: What Might We Become Attuned To If We Troubled Organisational Purpose?

Noticings: I notice a yearning to trouble purpose as an organisation’s compass. Decentralise it, eject it, and explore what we might attune to instead.

When I explore my resistance to organisational purpose, I find myself thinking of an oak tree and the deer that nibble at the grass that circles its trunk, and the idea of purpose seems strange. What would an oak or a deer know of purpose, its own or any other being or substance it meets? I find only DNA coding meeting environmental awareness, attunement, and response-ability meeting inevitable seasonality.

I widen my gaze and look to messy, enlivened ecosystems full of beings and substances in relationship, and I find only wonderful multitudes of DNA coding and awareness, attunement, and response-ability meeting inevitable seasonality informing each other, bringing forth fertile ecotones, constant worlding, a wellspring of inter- and intra-action. What would this dazzling, kaleidoscopic mess of living know of purpose? What would be its need?