The Aesthetics of Inquiry: What Questions Drive Your Purpose?
Last Monday, in session three of the conversation series, “Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture,” I asked Nora Bateson about one of her favorite phrases: the aesthetics of inquiry.
She lit up. “Oh, this is so important to me, Greg. My heart and soul is in this question. Inquiry and curiosity are where there’s so much learning and ways of being. But: what is the tone of the inquiry? What’s the texture? What’s the rhythm? What’s the flavor? What’s the feeling? What’s the vibe?”
In music, there are four basic elements: rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre—the tone color and texture of sound.
Nora Bateson brings the aesthetic of inquiry into interpersonal group conversations. Tending to the contexts of communication, and the ecology of relationships, she provides a warm data tone-color-and-texture supplement to the cold approaches of Big Data and Systems Theory. In so doing, the complexity of each of us can dance with the complexity of others with heart, openness, and what we in the Jazz Leadership Project call Big Ears: deep listening.
The Power of Questions
The older I get and the more I experience life, the more I realize that the power of questions and inquiry are as—or even more important—than the answers. In fact, preceding answers are questions, yes?
That’s why for today’s final session, “Giving Birth to an Emergent Wisdom Commons,” I’ll share with you, based on my knowledge of their work, the questions I think today’s guests—Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal, and Zak Stein—are pursuing.
One of the many things I dig about these cats is that not only are they wicked smart and capacious of knowledge and vision. They are also men of action, building companies and firms, institutions and ideas, to try to influence the course of our immediate future for the better. They don’t passively view the mess we’re in as a species and a civilization and just throw their hands up in the air like they just don’t care.
They care enough to dance with the needs and potentialities of our moment, striving to bring and make more sense amid senselessness, clarity over confusion, and light through darkness. Take Jordan Hall, for instance.
Jordan Hall
Jordan is the co-founder of the Neurohacker Collective, which launched in 2015 to create well-being products to enhance peak performance through application of complex systems science. Rather than using chemicals to override our body’s regulatory systems, the purpose of their products, for cognition, longevity, immunity, energy, and sleep, is to support “the body’s ability to self-regulate.”
He’s in the health-and-well-being business, yet that’s not why I invited him to join today’s session at 5:30 ET at The Stoa online. I invited him based on his pursuit and thought leadership on a design for better systems and institutions. For instance, Jordan is a thought-leader in the Game B community. (Online, Jordan Hall and Jordan Greenhall are the same person.)
The Game B construct is basically this: ever since human beings passed the Dunbar limit of a person having a close personal network of no more than 150 people, we’ve been in a Game A of an adversarial, win-lose, extraction and exploitation. Game B attempts to innovate social institutions and cultural artifacts that counter Game A’s negative aspects, before the race to the bottom makes us extinct.
Jordan calls legacy media the Blue Church. He’s hosting a series on Youtube about The Civium Project, a reimagining of the design of cities, that form the basis of today’s civilization, on micro and macro scales.
His work brings up these questions for me:
How can we transition from an extractive social model based on scarcity to one of abundance based on wise governance and technological affluence?
How can we make such a shift without falling into the traps of Game A in cities, which instead of increasing human sovereignty makes most humans dependent on extractive systems?
Is it possible to change the current virtual media ecology, driven by advertising, incentive to weaponize conflict, and where AI manipulates people by exploiting their desires and psychology? If so, how?
Jamie Wheal
In fall 2019, Jewel and I watched a multi-hour verbal jam session on the Rebel Wisdom platform between Jordan, Jamie, and Daniel Schmachtenberger, a guest on the second of the two sessions last Monday. The topic they discussed was Collective Intelligence, which, to make it through the landmines all about us, is necessary to cultivate, wouldn’t you agree?
They drew on a range of metaphors, including jazz. This lit me up; Jewel too, as our business is based on applying jazz praxis and methods to generate leadership success and team and organizational flourishing. I predicted that we’d get in those circles; by May 2020, we were guests at the Rebel Wisdom Festival online.
See my coverage here of the pre-festival presentations by Diane Musho Hamilton and Jamie Wheal.
Jamie is Executive Director of the FlowGenome Project, dedicated to helping people normalize flow states, by many means necessary, to enhance their lives at work, in play, and in relationships. He hosts a podcast at the Neurohacker Collective, HomeGrown Humans: Collective Insights. Jamie, who co-authored the best-seller, Stealing Fire with Steven Kotler in 2017, is the author of the upcoming Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind.
I see Jamie as asking questions such as:
How can we steal the fire of the gods, the ambrosia of flow states, but not burnout and lose touch with others?
How can we raise consciousness and evolve culture to be in service of others and not just ourselves and our tribes?
What are the ways we can democratize peak states, heal our wounds, and build ethical culture rather than exploitative cults?
Zak Stein
Although I had read several of Zak’s scholarly essays, including an excellent one about the intersection of Integral Theory and American pragmatism, when I signed up for Meridian University’s “Thriving in Complexity” course about five years ago, this course, which Zak co-taught with Meridian’s President, Dr. Aftab Omer, was my first direct interaction with him.
I found Zak to have a tone of grace and deep intelligence suffused by suffering. I could feel that he was familiar with the blues, and not just because he’d played that form as a musician. Zak has deep awareness of the tragic dimensions of life, yet he has left that station, arriving at a post-tragic sensibility that manifests when he speaks, the slight chuckle that bubbles up from underneath the profundity that comes off his tongue with such ease—as heard last Monday with Daniel and Gregg Henriques in our fourth session overall.
He’s a psychologist and educational philosopher; in fact, in the latter category he’s my favorite. He became my favorite educational philosopher after reading his 2019 work, Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. He co-founded Lectica while studying at Harvard, striving to redesign standardized testing infrastructures. He’s the Academic Director of the Center for Integral Wisdom and a contributor and advisor to the Consilience Project. From my viewpoint, these questions inform Zak’s purpose and inspires his work:
How can we re-establish teacherly authority and legitimacy when change is too swift for teachers and the elders to keep up?
How can we enable intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge when the K-12 education system is based on 19th century life?
How can the information ecology become a commons for educational abundance as well as human and system flourishing?
We’d love for you to join us this afternoon at 5:30 ET. Click here, go to Communal Podcasts, and sign up for free.
In the meantime, I wonder: what questions drive your purpose?