Presentations from the 2008 module Solving Tough Problems

Watch the video by Louise Koch here. Flipchart notes reproduced here.

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“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”—Martin Luther King Jr.

“Power is the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity” “Love is the drive towards the unity of the separated.”—Paul Tillich

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‘Shih (pronounced shrr) is a configuration of forces that focus power. Power is the application of force to produce a particular change or result. Force is the application of energy to produce change.”—Jim Gimian

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A virtuous circle is produced with power engaging love that in turn legitimates power.

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Power creates new social realities. Power plus love create new beneficial (sustainable?) social realities.

Power is the will or ability to shape reality. This is not bad!  Love uses energy in a system to co-create inclusively.

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Power is more powerful being charged by love. Love is more loving being charged by power. So power and love feed each other in a virtuous circle.

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Force is like water (polluted or clean) flowing downhill. It turns a water wheel, which provides power: the organisation and mobilisation of force (intention, the U-Process). Downstream the water is provided for villagers; flour is also produced.

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Creation can happen from love or power. Co-creation requires both love and power.

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Russian dolls of  love within energy within force within power.

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The co-creative process is like a dance: open awareness of each other and of the content, and the constant exchange between love and power sometimes flows and sometimes struggles.

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The co-creators of new social realities need to: understand the flow of power and energy in the current system; find a place to stand where power and love are congruent within them; and have compassion and empathy for the depth of transformation they are asking of others and of themselves.

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Power is either a movement into love, or a movement into a quest for dominance. This is dependent on your stance or worldview: a worldview of connection in the presence of separateness or a worldview of fundamental isolation. Choosing to deepen into love opens a palette of possibilities for play and how we engage power.

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In unity, we co-create the environment that nourishes the realisation of ourselves extensively and intensively, thereby becoming fully human and capable of engaging in social change.

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Lightning, reckless in its strike The desert, lacking life In unity we become the rod to tame the destruction bringing nourishment to barren soil.

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Power and love together, Like heaven and earth, Create life.

Earth alone is sterile, a desert, The anemic love. Heaven alone is destructive, lightening, The abusive power.

But from a fertile earth, A forest grows towards heaven.

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To know and act from (your) core fundamental beliefs is where power and love dance.

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Dialogue is an act of love. Communication is an act of power: the capacity to identify the common good. The ability of people to change their belief systems through dialogue and communication is co-creation.

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The words “power” and “love” are too loaded to be effective in describing the challenge we face. Co-creating new social realities requires us to assert and describe reality and needs equal measures of both “power” and “love.” Power and love are so inter-twined in both meaning and the reality they describe that we have to find some way not to see them as separate.

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In the middle, between the extremes of all power and no love and all love and no power, lies a space with both power and love: the “nimble zone.”

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How do you relate power and love to the human triad of courage, compassion and wisdom or willing, feeling and thinking? During the week I kept thinking that I missed something like reflection when I was playing with love and power. In your work you use scenarios. I suppose you could see that as a form of reflection or thinking.

I mentioned it earlier in the week. I was intrigued by the difference between power and the language of power and between love and the language of love. Is it possible that you have power (or love)  but are not very good in using both, not very good at the language of both power and love. So is being fluent in the language and extra asset that can compensate (to a certain extent) a lesser position (amount of power)?

Peter van der Lugt