Source as Ecologically Entangled Yet Distinct and Bounded

Learnings (so far) from crafting a relationship covenant between two people in source roles.

Introducing Cellular Rearranging’s first co-authorship. With pleasure, I’m sharing this dialogue, in which the always wise and always generous guide, author, facilitator, and friend Michelle Holliday and I explore what we’ve been learning about being in source roles from writing a relationship covenant together.

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Anna-Marie: Michelle and I have a lot in common. We both experience and understand organisations as living systems, as ecologies; rich in relationship and relationality, and inseparable from the wider ecological, social, and technological systems they are in relationship with.

We are both excited by organisations as ripe practice grounds for being human, for stewardship, for listening for and responding to signals, for rooting reimagined stories and worldviews, and for living response-ably within a multispecies world.

We are also both holding source roles in multiple ways. Meaning that we act as the source of perspectives and initiatives and steward them as they wend their way through the world.

Specific to what drew us together and sparked the relationship covenant explored here, Michelle is the source of her decades-rich work on organisational and community thrivability (recently deepened and expanded into stewarding the thrivable world community) and I am the source of the recent Ecological Organisations Framework (released into creative commons) and the deeper story of organisations (and humans) as ecological that the framework rests on.

Common Threads and Entanglement

Michelle: The common threads of our work created in me an urge to connect, but also to be cautious and thoughtful. The source role comes with responsibility to honour the boundaries of what we are stewarding. Where there is abundant commonality with another’s work, the space between can be a rich, creative ecotone.

The Core Practice Areas of Thrivability by Michelle Holliday

I have also experienced it as dangerous territory in which I felt I was losing my focus and even losing myself. Such is the existential entanglement of the source role. Without care, tension can simmer and erupt, when the real issue is the need to honour each other as sources of distinct contributions. 

The broader movement we’re both part of is quick to advocate co-creation and collaboration as the assumed antidotes to the dominant narrative’s preference for competition and individualism. So deeply held is this belief that I have encountered critical judgement – from others and from myself – around my boundary-tending. Is it just my ego? Do I just not play well with others? Am I not walking the talk of a living, co-creative world? 

Source as Ecological

But I have come to believe that an ecological view is more nuanced than this. Nature loves diversity, honours the role of each species, contains distinctness and boundedness.

Within the emerging life-aligned narrative, there is increasing recognition that part of stewarding our gifts and contributions is protecting them, giving them our concentrated focus, recognizing the unique conditions they require; like plants tended to within a greenhouse.