Gaia University - Glossary

It is not certain when the term was first used, but Dr. Reg Revans of England is widely credited as the man who developed the action learning methodolgy for training managers.

In the 1930s he had worked as a member of Ernest Rutherford’s research team, at the Cavendish Laboratories, University of Cambridge. This gave Revans the impetus to develop his ideas on action learning. Each week Rutherford would gather together his team - which consisted of more than a dozen future Nobel Laureates - and encourage them to question their own knowledge and to collaborate on developing fresh ideas.

In 1935, Revans become director of education at Essex County Council. While there, a colleague asked him to look at the high level of staff turnover among nurses in hospitals. Why did so many leave after training? His investigations revealed the main reason for dissatisfaction among newly qualified nurses: the culture in which they worked did nothing to encourage them. The result of his research was a paper written in 1938 that called for a prototype version of action learning. He envisaged continuing trouble unless senior managers ‘understand that they will only know their problems if they understand what the workers are thinking’. The war interrupted Revans' work in education and he became head of emergency services for the East End of London. At the end of the war, he worked on the restructuring of the coal industry, which went into public ownership in 1946. He was responsible for planning recruitment, education and training, but began his task by working for several weeks at the coalface in Durham. He championed a staff training college to be run by the colliery managers - outside ‘experts’ were in his view, not needed. ‘We do not need to sit at the feet of gurus’ said Reg. The pits that tried out his methods reported a 30 per cent increase in productivity.

Revans went on to become the first professor of business at the University of Manchester, where he worked until 1965. Revans' vision was of practical business people learning from each other, creating their own resources, identifying their own problems and forming their own solutions. This was not how most academics saw it. Revans' next big challenge was Belgium. He headed the inter-university project, which had the task of moving the small kingdom up from the bottom of the organization for economic co-operation and development league, where it had languished for several years. Traditional measures had been tried but had failed. Under Revans' stewardship, five Belgian universities and 23 of the country's largest business organizations worked together to find a solution to the national malaise. This collective approach succeeded in putting Belgium's industrial productivity growth rate, at 102%, ahead of the US, Germany and Japan between 1971 and 1981.

Gaia U. has been designed from the joint threads of the International Management Centres Association which has been offering action learning based business programs since 1982 and the Permaculture Diploma WorkNet, designed by Gaia U. founder Andy Langford which has been offering action learning Applied Permaculture Diplomas since 1993.

Actionist.

A person committed to world change through praxis (following a particular course of action) that exemplifies the change(s) they wish to see - 'be the change you want' - may also be an activist although more likely to be engaged in constructive action rather than protest.

Carrying capacity.

This increasingly well-known term refers to the ability of the Earth to both sustainably support, at natural rates of extinction, the complete population of life, and maintain, more or less indefinitely, appropriate conditions for the continued evolution of life. Currently, due almost certainly to human activity, we are exceeding by a large margin (at least 3:1) the carrying capacity of Gaia.

Fund earning.

Gaia University should ultimately, through the accumulation of Associates fees:

fund its core operations
provide good opportunities for revenue drawings of sufficiency for all contributing partners.

This is notwithstanding the generous contributions of supporting agencies that are providing start-up funds. Gaia University will explore other sources of funds at international, regional and local levels to accelerate its development as well as provide bursary funding for learners with low economic resources.

Integrality.

Many recent thinkers, since the 1930's onwards, have proposed the need for an integrated/integral way of thinking in which the boundaries between disciplines are deconstructed.

For example, in England, Norman Glaister gathered colleagues in the 1950's to found the Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research in order to explore the principles of integration in relation to activists seeking to re-shape a libertarian society after the authoritarian crescendo of World War II.

Ludwig Von Bertalanffy proposed his General Systems Theory in the 1970's as a cross discipline, integrative way of thinking - an early go at 'a theory of everything'.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren's Permaculture is a masterful construct of some guiding principles for functionally integrated, ecologically sound and socially just cultures adapted principally to local climate, landform and soil.

Latest in this fascinating lineage is Ken Wilber, whose book 'A Theory of Everything', overlays his own map of integrality with Spiral Dynamics. Using the 4 quadrants of individual subjective, individual objective, collective subjective and collective objective, which Wilber simplifies to 'I', 'It', 'We' and 'Its', he proposes that an intergral strategy must include activity in or attention to each of the quadrants, otherwise some part of the whole picture will be missing.

In our own interpretation of the quadrant we equate 'I' to myself as a learner and adaptable being in the world, 'It' to the material dynamics of Gaia, 'We' to the gathering of humans into informal, small-scale community and culture and 'Its' to the institutional, large scale cultural constructs of governance, law-making, 'economics' and the like.

See our interpretation of Wilber's model used as a framework for proposing curricula - this proposes that a world-changer wishing to act in a fully integrated way needs to have skills drawn from all four quadrants. Becoming competent in less than all the quadrants risks a person (or field) becoming over-specialized and thus impeding easy integration into a coherent whole: Exit Strategies

Inviolate core/Open source.

Gaia University contains a strategic mix of hands-off organizational design elements at the core (which cannot be altered except at international level) with a pattern-language-like design for the bulk of the organization. This both-and blend ensures consistent application of what must be consistent whilst leaving vast tracts of open space for creative and generative design by participants. Modeled on the stunning Open Source software community.

Leaderful, supportful, active followerful.

A new working theory of leadership in second tier (Spiral Dynamics)** organizations in which leadership is rehabilitated (having been denied in the last stages of first tier evolution) as an essential vector of initiation and creativity in organizations. Such an organization is termed 'leaderful' to indicate that there is no limit to the opportunities for taking leadership therein.

People taking leadership are supported by other people who are practicing their leadership skills and both of these roles are supported at the operational level by people 'doing' as conscious, active followers.

Open-book financial reporting.

Summarized accounts of Gaia University will be available for viewing by all partners - thus partners' accumulations of surpluses, investments in terms of time and capital, losses sustained, turnovers increased or diminished will be visible. This is expected to greatly aid in the general endorsement of pricing levels and to provide a strong feedback loop in the web.

Organizing structure.

Is decentralized through being locally organized and growing tip led. The organization is brought into being primarily in order to service the needs of the Associates who are, like the growing tips on a tree, the places where new opportunities for diversity, innovation and seeding are manifested. At the same time the learning provider partners are also supported in their projects and programs.

Partnerships where possible (Income solidarity).

Gaia University:

will operate as partnerships of self-employed persons wherever possible (research ongoing)
intends to establish a voluntary scheme for sharing portions of income between people working within the learning web. Thus people working in fertile and abundant regions can choose to support people working in less fertile, impoverished and strategically important regions
will develop a "fee structure" which takes into account disparate economic resources of learners world-wide. Learn more.

Peak oil.

Has the world's oil supply peaked (or is it about to) and what does this mean for our cultures?

Gaia University promotes decentralist solutions to Peak Oil. These attend to reducing our dependence on non-human energies - a PowerDown strategy, and, while others will heed the call when the need impacts more directly, we are working to support exisiting Lifeboats and to assist others to emerge. We are confident that creating and supporting Lifeboats is an intelligent preparation for the dynamics that will be stimulated by Peak Oil conditions. Additionally we know that the same strategy may work to ameliorate the dynamics stimulated by Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, Depletion of Natural Resources and exceeding Gaia's Carrying Capacity.

Policy governance - designed decision making.

The careful design of policy making and delegation processes that seek to make it completely clear, through written policies, at what level which decisions can be made and where responsibility lies. Policy Governance includes a process for evaluating the performance of each person in the web.

Realistic appraisal of the current situation.

We are at a crucial juncture in our human history. We must each choose whether to support the paths that may lead to the irrevocable destruction of our biosphere or the paths that support the Earth's capacity to regenerate its life support systems. Learn more.

Regional Organizers story.

Memories of a man who made a difference
by Andy Langford

Back in the 1960's my dad, Eric, worked as the Further Education Organiser in my home town, Totnes, in England. In this role he sought out teachers to lead evening classes and weekend workshops and recruited adult students to attend. This was a role supported by local government and much emphasis was placed on making sure that at least one evening class a week took place in outlying rural locations whilst a full suite of programs was on offer in the Community College in town.

The learning context was generally informal and the social energy of the evening gatherings was a highlight in many peoples' lives - adults attending classes in folk dancing, wine-making, singing in choirs, amateur dramatics, flower arranging, craft skills and more made up a lively and vital community of folk who occupied village halls and school rooms of an evening throughout the otherwise dark and uneventful winter.

It was clear to me that my dad's energy and creativity made a big difference to the overall quality and zest of the Community College. It was he that took the risk of promoting an unusual or strategic class in the area. This involved him in active recruitment of adults many of whom 'took' the new class only due to his persistent and enthusiastic selling. Eric would use me, my siblings and our mother (always with our permission) to make up numbers if a significant class looked likely to stall for want of students. Thus I got to do gas and arc welding at 16, judo at 17 and preparation for self-employment going on 18 (all of which have since come in handy).

It was through his efforts that many an adult, whose school age learning had stalled in a teenage crisis, re-entered the world of conscious learning and thus gathered their wits ready to better themselves and move out of a dead-end labourer's job. He really did keep an eye on the trajectory of local high-school failures and he'd have the patience to wait until they had recovered from their school experiences before gently encouraging them to have another go at getting an education.

Now I am leading the development of a new kind of global community college, Gaia U, with my partner Liora Adler. I think of Eric's efforts as a model of how we can operate on the local level.

Still on that interesting and productive edge encompassing both informal and formal education, still with adults who are chosing to enter and re-enter into a learning contract, still strategic and definitely practical, still with social currents in mind.

With Gaia U, however, there is strongly focussed attention to community regeneration, ecological restoration and the development of local and vigorous ecological and social actionism. They didn't know that they had Peak Oil in the 1960's! Now there is increased direction and purpose.

Also different is the capacity for each local organiser to take promising students right up to Bachelors and Masters degree level, right there on the spot, whether they come from a 'good' educational background or not.

And, what's more, local organisers can propose degree programs that meet the specific regeneration needs of their local communities. Think of that, a degree tailored to the needs of a village!

Thus Gaia U creates an unprecedented opportunity to develop a globally connected, locally relevant, democratized university level learning web focussed on social justice and ecological regeneration.

Self-employment for self-reliance.

Gaia University is based on a web of active people working in self-employed mode. Thus people draw income according to their effort and effectiveness, provide their own tools for the job, take care of their own relationships with local government and tax offices, shape their own working patterns to suit their circumstances, develop poly-income portfolios and regard themselves as partners in their own right rather than employees of a corporation.

Simple/Complex organization.

Each piece at each level of the Gaia University organization is formed according to a common, simple pattern. These assemble into a generative web that is capable of complex functions. Sometimes called a 'liberating structure'.

Spiral dynamics.

A theory of the evolution of human societies that proposes that the character of a culture is determined by over-arching ways of thinking called vMemes. Each vMeme is a collection of tough, replicable thinking patterns called memes which are capable of surviving successive generations. vMeme is to memes as flock is to birds and memes are to vMemes as strands are to ropes.

Imagine a meme as the cultural equivalent of a biological gene. A gene, in association with other genes determines how tissue cells in a body develop. Like genes, memes cause the tissues of a culture to 'be' a certain way. A meme may be positive for the well-being of a culture or otherwise.

For an incomplete example of a vMeme consider sexism (which is a marvellously persistent meme contained in almost all cultures of the world) joined with racism, classism and many more 'unhealthy' memes operating alongside 'healthy memes' of inclusion and tolerance (amongst others). The relative effects of these memes (and others) within the overall vMeme shapes our current cultures.

The original theory proposes that cultures oscillate, on a largish time scale, between more individualistic vMemes (represented by the warm colors - red, orange, yellow, coral) and more collective vMemes (cool colors - purple, blue, green, turquoise)

Spiral Dynamics theory was hypothesised, researched and finally proposed by Clare W Graves after a period of more than 20 years using US College participants as a study population. It continues to be developed by an international community led by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Don Beck proposes, from direct experience, that the application of Spiral Dynamics thinking was helpful to the emergence of the successful strategies of the post-apartheid transitional ANC Government in South Africa.

Ken Wilber has also added significantly to the development of Spiral Dynamics by overlaying his 'Integral' model (see Integrality) on the spiral.

Devolve! has added yet a further, illuminating layer of observation using the Divergent/Convergent constructs (see below). They observe that people in Divergent mode tend to function mostly in the individualistic vMemes (warm colors - red, orange, yellow, coral) and that people in Convergent mode tend to function mostly in the collective vMemes (cool colors - purple, blue, green, turquoise).

Devolve! also notes that Spiral Dynamics is not a good construct for mapping the evolution of tribal cultures as it assumes that tribal cultures are a passing phase in the spiral rather than a discrete 'choice' of evolutionary branching with a distinct long term 'spiral dynamic' of its own.

Strategic.

September 2005, I, Andy Langford, am on Platform 4 at Reading Station, near London waiting for a train to Totnes, in the south west of England. It is a trip I am anticipating with pleasure. It is early in the afternoon so the train will not be crowded, it is a fine day and I shall be passing through some of my most favourite and well known landscapes in the country with all the time to look out of the window and think permaculture thoughts.

I am also going home, to Totnes, where I was born and bred and where I lived, more or less non-stop, until I was 40. It is a special place for me. My mother and son still live there, my sister is not far away and other relatives are scattered about within 50 miles or so. We can gather 60 at a family get together in a local village hall spanning 4 generations from our 90 years old matriarch to new born babes in arms.

Well, who should I meet, on the station platform, but Mike Vickery. He's a long term Totnes resident, an artisan contemporary of mine who I know from my shoemaking days. Mike makes his living as a self-employed carpenter, one of the many craftspeople who add significantly to the unusual cultural flavour that make Totnes so distinctive. I am pleased to meet Mike again after what must be at least 15 years. We arrange to travel the journey together.

As we pass through the extensive marshlands on the north edge of Newbury the railroad follows the Kennet and Avon canal built in the 1700's to transport bricks and barley, east and west, across the entire country joining together the Thames in the east with the Bristol Avon in the west. Holidaymakers are the only traffic on the canal these days and our train roars past the narrow boats, peacefully pottering along at their 4 miles an hour to our 80.

Mike and I talk about the old days - the 1970's and 80's in Totnes and, in the moments of quiet, my mind turns to the food producing chinampa systems of pre-hispanic Mexico City. Look at the productivity we could develop in the wet areas around Newbury if we adopted such creative, intensive systems as chinampas here!

Soon we start catching up on our current lives, "what are you up to these days" we ask each other. Mike carpents still, in the Brook Farm workshops familiar to me as a chicken farm when I worked as a farm labourer in the 60's. My farmer, in nearby Littlehempston, had an arrangement to collect the hen manure once a week from Brook Farm and the collection task usually fell to me. Eventually the farm gate price of eggs fell and the chicken farm failed. Subsequently the buildings had organically converted to a kind of shanty town business zone, providing much needed, low cost (although quite substandard) workshop accommodation for modest artisans.

By now we were passing out from between the massive chalk ridges near Swindon, the remains of the huge chalk dome that used to cover much of southern England before the last ice-age. I used to farm sheep on 40 acres of this chalk land, with its concrete like covering of clay mixed with flints, Droughty, stony land with only thin top soils quite unsuited to any arable cultivations but now extensively ploughed (and thus eroded) courtesy of the oil powered and chemicalized 'miracle' of modern industrial agriculture. Field sizes commonly extend to 20 hectares with no significant woodlands or hedges in sight. Dead land, really. Thousands of hectares shattered by the arrogance of modernism with the bony white chalk subsoil poking through everywhere.

As it was my turn to share I explained to Mike that I was working at creating Gaia University - specifically to counter the dominance of inappropriate industrial thinking and to foster small scale, progressive approaches to the transformation of human societies. To anchor the idea I tried to describe how our system of accredited action learning degrees could work for artisans, how they could thus become qualified as ecosocial entrepreneurs focussed on localisation, with more self-esteem and more influence. It turned out that Mike already had a Bachelors degree and so he wanted to know if he could go for a Masters. That then raised the issue of how to judge if a person's project was sufficiently strategic or not.

We gave it a short try and then settled into watching the countryside go by, eating our picnic lunches and began talking of other things. We discovered a mutual interest in salsa music, me from my time as trombone player in Alka Salsa (the band for the night before the morning after) and Mike as current pianist, writer and arranger with the 8 piece Siga La Salsa ensemble - new on the Totnes scene since I left in the early 90's.

Mike talked too of his father, a pioneer in on-line university library cataloging systems to whom he had just paid a visit in Reading and was thus returning home from.....

We watched as the train pushed past the south end of the Mendips hills, a modest massif of limestone, mined for coal at Radstock until the 1960's, and brought us out into the wide expanses of the low lying Somerset Sedge Moors. My brother lives out there somewhere in the distance and we tried to see if Glastonbury Tor was visible as we clattered on.

Then talk turned to Totnes, to the proposed Southern Development which will take the last of the open space in the middle of the town for residential accommodation. In my youth this open space was home to 3 vegetable and flower nurseries from which Totnes derived much of its market produce.

I clearly recall shopping in town with Eric, my father, one summer Saturday and discovering Heath's vegetable shop in the High Street to be out of tomatoes. No problem there. We were sent two hundred yards, down the alley between Haymans Department Store and the Nissen hut that was the old Civic Hall, up the ancient, high walled, Lepers Walk to Heaths own nursery. There we found the old man, George Heath himself, watering rows of tomatoes in the large Victorian greenhouse. The scent of fresh tomatoes was almost overpowering. We picked our two or three pounds fresh off the vines and, whilst Eric made modest payment, he and George rumbled on about the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta they were both due to perform in later that year.

Alas these essential places of food production have long gone - rendered unviable by the economics of supermarkets and logistics chains that can deliver 'fresh' tomatoes from almost anywhere in the world, all year round, for less than the price of any home grown delicacies.

So now these spaces are due for development, sensitive of course, and, at least, designed by local architects with heritage, emergy and low energy consumption in mind. Mike makes windows and had been contemplating gearing up with new equipment to enable him to make the high specification triple glazed windows required for the development but the volume against delivery times was too much for him to handle alone.

By now we were snaking down through the middle of the higher Exe valley, past Collumpton Mill, thinking about chinampas again, acre after acre of these replacing the marginal sheep farming in this wet valley (thus riddled with foot-rot) and anticipating the spectacular River Exe side ride coming up in half an hour.

What was needed in Totnes, we determined, was a loose partnership of carpenters and joiners some of whom could work out of their existing workshops, some of whom would open a new, jointly funded and well equipped facility with precision machinery. Such a group could focalise and dissolve at will, sometimes acting in concert, sometimes going solo, always busy. The plan would need some recruiting energy, some arrangements to rehearse and then ...... no contract too big, no leaks to outside economies as architects buy joinery from large scale makers in Sweden just because of availability issues ..... imagine this, a network of local artisans willing and capable of delivering manufactured goods from local sources ..... Now we're onto something!

We both noticed it at the same time - that this is the meaning of strategic, a project of vision, that creates significant local capacity, that opens a larger space in which individuals can learn to cooperate for the collective good without losing their autonomy, a chaord capable of extension into many fields of collaboration, an expression of healthy complexity in which locals compete successfully with multi-nationals through a creative commons......

Now here comes the staggering ride down the Exe estuary, round the point of the Dawlish Warren, along Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 19th Century granite sea wall past the Edwardian holidays towns of Dawlish and Teignmouth with ocean to the left and then a quick right turn inland again towards Newton Abbot up the Teign Estuary. What a magnificent treat. Estuary, ocean, then estuary again.

Just 20 minutes to go, now into a landscape I know in detail, past Stoneycombe Quarry, the Gipsons old Mill House, into the valley of the River Hems, past Littlehempston where the dead elm has finally fallen in the field where I used to gather in the cows for milking, over the place where the Hems and the River Dart merge and down the tracks to Totnes Station.

What a journey, glorious landscape, renewed friendship and the clarification of a fuzzy concept all experienced without effort.

Worldwatch.

See the World Watch Institute Web Site for inspired, comprehensive, well researched and trusted appraisal of our current cultures abilities to live within Gaia's Carrying Capacity. See also the Best Food Forward Web Site for another approach to the same issue.

The "Patrix"

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