what is visionary organizing?
Matt Birkhold
Within each of us there is an inner-wisdom that urges us to love, be considerate, be useful, and leads to fulfillment when we listen to it. We might call it intuition, we might call it spirit, conscience, or any number of things. This inner-wisdom represents what could be called a logic of wellbeing and it leads us to grow personally, fulfill our potential, and nurture our minds, bodies, and spirits as well as nurture others.
Imagine communities, organizations, workplaces and whole societies that are led by inner-wisdom. They would likely value how people feel as much as what people do. They would be capable of and committed to changing directions when the direction they were headed no longer worked. They could solve conflict in ways that affirm dignity. Individuals in them would trust their inner wisdom and wouldn’t have to depend on others approval to feel good about themselves. In relationships, we would be able to practice healthy boundaries and be able to walk away from relationships that aren’t healthy. An economy guided by our collective inner-wisdom would prevent starvation and homelessness and would be sustainable both economically and ecologically.
The goal of Visionary Organizing is to create organizations, communities, workplaces, and societies that resemble a vision like this one. Visionary Organizing is a framework and approach to community and organizational change that equally emphasizes material and nonmaterial needs. The term was first used by Grace Lee Boggs around 2011 to describe the work of re-imagining, re-spiriting, and re-building urban communities. As a framework, it draws on the work of James and Grace Lees Boggs, Erich Fromm, Meg Wheatley, World Systems Analysis, Toni Cade Bambara, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others.
As an approach to change, it is rooted in the theory of emergent systems. Visionary Organizing does not create change by marshaling resources and people to force what already exists to change. Visionary Organizing transforms reality by recognizing and nurturing interdependence, transforming relationships, and creating new patterns and systems that — once taken to scale — become capable of replacing what already exists.
Visionary Organizing consists of six components, three personally transformative components and three collectively transformative components:
Personally Transformative Components
Connecting to and Trusting Our Inner Wisdom
Locating Ourselves in Systems and History
Recognizing and Nurturing Interdependence
Collectively Transformative Components
Imagining New Possibilities
Affirming Dignity
Experimenting with Transformation
How The Components Connect
It’s really easy to ignore our inner wisdom because to survive we have to focus on satisfying our material needs for things like food and rent. But, when we consciously connect to and trust our inner-wisdom, we find wisdom that leads us to make decisions on a more heartfelt basis. This wisdom leads us to fulfillment, purpose, and right relationship with others and earth and to meet our material needs. When we’ve connected to it, we often ask, “why don’t I do this more often?”
When we ask this question, we locate ourselves in systems and history because we see that connecting to and trusting our inner wisdom is made difficult by systems that prioritize material needs for survival over less tangible nonmaterial needs for wellbeing. As we recognize that there is a historical explanation for why it’s so easy to neglect our nonmaterial needs, we create conditions to heal from shame and individualist ways of thinking about ourselves that tell us that we’re not good enough, are failures, or are inferior to others.
When we recognize and nurture interdependence, we see that although the systems we live under have great power over our lives, these systems also give us relational power that can be used to put our inner wisdom into the world. By using this inner wisdom and recognizing interdependence, we can begin to see ourselves as more powerful than we otherwise might and we make choices about how to use our power. We can even choose to create cultures and systems that make it easier to connect to our inner wisdom.
When we choose to let our inner-wisdom inspire us to solve problems, we begin to imagine new possibilities that align with the logic of our inner-wisdom rather than the logic of satisfying only material needs. With this vision for how to solve a community based or organizational problem, we can share it with others and collectively revise it. We can then use relational power to attract others to it or to start it.
Once we begin sharing our vision or doing the work of creating new possibilities with others, we don’t have to try to convince others that they should join us. Instead, by affirming their dignity, or intentionally honoring the inherent value and worth of people by recognizing their humanity and fulfilling their right to be seen, respected, and heard, we can attract them to us, our vision, or the new practices and systems we’re creating.
When we have a group of people who share a vision about creating a new possibility, we can then experiment with transformation by taking small steps to make reality more closely resemble our vision. As we learn, we can make our vision more real by continuing to connect to and trust our inner-wisdom, by learning to better recognize and nurture interdependence, and by better learning to affirm dignity. As our work grows, we can continue locating ourselves in systems as history by seeing and naming the collective transformations we are contributing to.
