Tapping Living Systems’ Cycles of Community Wellness
Understanding and facilitating internally generated community wellness making use of adaptive processes already in place is fundamental to stemming conflict and restoring harmony. Communities and societies are living organisms with self-organizing systems of relationships governing their behavior. By participating with these processes, healthy cycles of healing and development can be recognized and nurtured.
Effective, adaptive community development that nourishes internal well being has been identified as crucial to conflict resolution. “Human capital must be restored and her traditions, heritage, and sense of community must not be lost.” Recent research indicates a relationship between increases in externally mandated social intervention and retarded community development prompting a study of community development/ wellness in greater depth.
The purpose of my research was to develop an adaptive community development tool in the form of an ongoing, self-perpetuating process by which community residents actively participate in local and regional conflict resolution by using systems in place to collectively determine criteria and devise strategies for the attainment of common goals that improve well being.
My findings are made available in the hopes of moderating a global need for a process model to improve quality of life by working with the processes of conflict and healing for community wellness and development. This presentation and discussion are to examine the aspects of community dynamics that affect community development, and suggest the content and design of a local community development model crafted within the adaptive living systems’ cycles already present in the community.
Despite the implementation of a multitude of community development strategies, the condition of communities five years pre and post internal conflict is that of sluggish economic growth and the steady decline in wages leading to virulent competition between communities for limited state monies and out of state commerce. This competition has bred a lack of cooperation and an unwillingness to share information resulting in expensive program duplication and the division of resources further retarding economic vigor. The number and percentage of families and communities requesting assistance has increased; correspondingly, the state has increased social services.
Government budgets indicate that often 40% of the state’s resources is spent on social services. The obvious discrepancy between resources provided by the state and the apparent well being of the inhabitants led to the conclusion that the state’s community development efforts are inadequate. In considering the aspects of community dynamics that affect community development, the way in which communities are dynamic was examined. Using Webster’s (1985) definition: something that is changing, progressive, effective, and productive, communities are indeed dynamic; an exhaustive search of the literature demonstrated that the internal mechanisms that power and govern this dynamic must be incorporated into any efforts aimed at community development.
The evolution of communities has been impeded and harmed by attempts to “correct” and improve its path. Even so, there is evidence that the community as an entity is rebounding. As the primordial social organizations began to breakdown following the Industrial Revolution, and the acceleration of this disintegration during the past fifty years, people began seeking surrogates to fulfill their social needs. These replacements were most often outside the community relieving communal obligation and responsibility. The emphasis on financial resources fueled the emotional connection between economic recompense and meaning, importance and value.
With less dependence on, and responsibility to, neighbors and family members, social interaction became less important than individuality. The accentuation of the importance of the self over the group led to the erosion of healthy social behavior, increased competition, and greater emotional need. Social norms are a product of social capital. Social capital is built through trust, interaction, and validation. Man is a social animal. Even the most learned person cannot know everything or be everything. Humans are designed to depend on one another (Pinker, 1997). Without a close-knit communal social system to fall back on, and conditioned to use money instead of obligation as a means of exchange, people depend most on non-reciprocal relationships leaving each to feel freer, yet less involved, less necessary, and more isolated. Increased social problems and efforts to mange them affected the economic health of individuals and communities. The relationship between economic well being and social well being, however, was misunderstood, and policy makers became determined to improve the economic landscape in hopes of improving community and familial life.
Agencies, planners, and underfloor heating consultants began implementing structured, broad-based, community development programs with externally established expectations and goals. These mandated projects and initiatives were surface solutions created to “fix” problems that were rooted in disparate community relationships on a multitude of levels. These programs were not designed to evolve with the community as a process, and did not include aspects that would indicate an understanding of communities as complex systems.
Human behavior is very frequently counterintuitive to individual and collective wellness. Human relationships are communicated through this behavior making outcomes difficult to predict and even harder to control externally. The choices people make are influenced by innumerable variables on many levels. Like weather systems, ecosystems, and societies, communities are dynamic, complex living systems in a continual state of transition contributing to adaptation. While complexity in living things is a natural and healthy state, it consists more of process than structure, and it is the continuation of these processes that feed the development of the system.
Community dynamics make up the driving force behind the direction and form of community development over time. When public policy imposes structure on a complex system for the purpose of manipulation or evaluation, the effort is ineffective. Rather than the planned interface, the structures imposed create boundaries. The created boundaries induce resistance and distortion. Uninterrupted, internal feedback loops within communities amplify and diffuse the energy that causes temporary disequilibrium. Once off balance, the resulting energy begins to reconfigure the system, to reorganize and renew. This process gives the community resiliency over stability, which is far more adaptive.
Simple, one-tier, cause and effect relationship solutions can produce short-term improvement, but always with subsequent disappointment, and often confounding deterioration. Still, the desire to measure progress or define in familiar, easily quantifiable terms is so great that structure continues to be the focus of volumes of statistical works, that eclipse the multi-dimensional underpinnings and inner-workings of community life. This emphasis on structure guides policy; and the consequent policies inhibit healthy community evolvement. The solutions needed to meet the needs of communities can only be addressed from within its internal systems. The internal systems that influence adaptive behaviors require information sharing. Information sharing comes about as a consequence of the trust that is built through reciprocal relationships. The willingness to risk and motivation to participate in these relationships can be inspired through collective learning.
What is significant about this research is that it has revealed that communities are dynamic, complex systems; externally mandated social service programs can negatively affect individual and communal behavior, and certain collective learning activities can instigate the regeneration of communal relationships and well being. These findings, and the accompanying conclusions and recommendations, can be used to modify public policy and contribute to the creation of learning processes necessary for improved quality of life.
The data analyzed reinforced the importance of reciprocal relationships to self-worth and defined the depth to which social service programs can cause harm. It became evident that human behavior, and overall well being, had a tendency to degrade if insulated from responsibility and control. Within this literature search surfaced several studies that suggested that humans must meet certain needs before being able to develop emotionally and psychologically. Moreover, if these needs were provided for from the outside, the individual would not actually move forward developmentally. Theoretically, each individual must go through the process of surmounting levels of life’s challenges personally. It became evident that it might be possible that this was occurring on the community level.
To explore this possibility, collective behavior, human interaction, group motivation, and the forces that drive collaboration were studied. At first, group behavioral responses to outside stimulus seemed desultory, and often counterintuitive. This prompted a reexamination of the data gathered on the dynamics of the community and the role that system complexity played in that process. This reevaluation provoked the plausibility that there could be a co-evolutionary, systemic, correlation between the macro-behavior of the community and micro-behavior of individuals. The possibility surfaced that because the community is a living organism that behaves as a complex system, and the individual is a component of that system, the individuals in groups within those systems may have similar development prerequisites. In other words, if communities must progress through cycles of balance and imbalance to develop, it was conceivable that individuals, and groups of individuals within the larger community needed to participate in a similar process in order to develop. This would explain the seemingly senseless actions and recurring instability demonstrated by group behaviors. If development is defined as improved self-worth, cohesiveness, and satisfaction within the group, the literature bore out this speculation and emphasized that misguided intervention had clearly stymied the community development process.
If individuals, groups, and communities must individually and collectively meet and overcome obstacles through a continuous spiral wave of disequilibrium punctuated by equilibrium in order to develop, what vehicle could best stimulate this natural process? In other words, what is it that powers the adaptive cycle? During the research, the symbiotic relationship of learning to self-esteem, motivation to participate, willingness to risk, and ability to survive, surfaced repeatedly. The direction of the research shifted to investigating the effects collective adult learning had on group behavior.
It was revealed that adult group learning inspires the sharing of resources, cooperation, and a desire for continued learning. Once this was established, more in-depth research was begun on how adults learn, what it is that motivates them to learn. Adult learning based theories and methods were studied. It was found that adults respond most favorably to relevant, problem-centered learning activities. Because, it was ascertained that adult learning is intermittent and combinatory, their learning improves through consistent, repetitive exposure to information, especially when presented in familiar context. The most successful formats for adult learning included those that were voluntary, predominantly non-hierarchical (peer-to-peer), informal, in a setting where some or all of the participants were familiar with each other and the learning could be applied. This finding parallels the contention in the literature that frequent contact with a stable set of others builds the relationships that construct social capital over time, and is supported by the documented power of social movements. By learning collectively, not only do human behaviors become increasingly more altruistic, but also participants fulfill their need to be a part of a solution, to share, to contribute.
Finally, since problem-centered learning promised improved motivation and participation, content and design attributes of problem-centered learning activities were analyzed and examined. How problems to be resolved were chosen, and how disruption during the periods of imbalance was weathered, was of particular interest. Few examples of such programs were found, and none had been created for the purpose of improving quality of life. Still, when the resultant data was viewed in relationship with the existing body of research already disseminated, it was found to be both invaluable and congruent. Once all the data had been analyzed, and the relevant pieces extracted, conceptions emerged from the aggregate parts supporting several implications and conclusions.
Implications of the Study
The findings of the study resulted in at least six implications. These implications include:
1. Externally created community development solutions limit the opportunities for the generation of learning and subsequent adaptive strategies by local residents.
2. Externally created community development solutions allow citizenry to remain independent from one another reducing the likelihood of the reciprocal relationships and consequent social capital required for communal well being.
3. Challenge, imbalance, and levels of chaos are a necessary ingredient in the development of all living organisms, including individuals and communities.
4. The structure of strictly formatted social service programs is incompatible with the dynamic nature of complex living systems, such as communities, reducing their effectiveness or probability of long-term success.
5. The attempt to adjust or modify the cycle of equilibrium to disequilibrium by retooling programs that have been designed to address a segment of the process perceived as a simple cause and effect, will result in unpredictable, possibly catastrophic ramification elsewhere in the system.
6. Individuals and groups participating in informal, problem-based collective learning activities will experience balance and imbalance, accomplishment and validation during the process. The community will cycle through struggle and recovery, declination and ascension; self-worth will prosper, interrelationships will multiply, well being will improve.
Conclusions
In addition, the implications and conclusions urged the following subsidiary recommendations:
1. Local policy-makers incrementally withdraw social service programs that have been created at a state or regional level.
2. State policy-makers return the responsibility of social well being and quality of life to local citizenry.
3. Local policy-makers be given the results, implications, conclusions, and recommendations of this study.
4. Local policy-makers meet briefly with the leaders of area civic, scholastic, ecclesiastical and business organizations and share the information secured from this study, and request volunteers to participate is community self-development.
5. Local policy-makers meet with volunteers and share content and design suggestions for problem-based learning activities.
6. Volunteers record quality of life and well being related opinions and perceptions of participants and members of the community selected at random.
7. These opinions and perceptions are monitored over time for the purpose of continued research.
Summary
People are social animals; it is their nature to desire and earnestly try to help one another, especially those we see as vulnerable. This desire evolved as an adaptation to improve survival of the individual and the group. It is evidenced by our emotional and psychological need to be a part of something, and the physiology of our cooperative learning processes.
In a sincere desire to understand and improve quality of life, people have created efficient, quantifiable methods of community development. In doing so, we purposefully distanced ourselves from each other; and, from the problems of, and accountability, to others. What we could not know was that when we were left with only personal difficulties to overcome, we would begin to question our self-worth. And significantly, when unknown others met these needs, we became increasingly disconnected and dependent.
Consequently, we recognized less value in ourselves and distrusted most others. Simultaneously, our reduced interaction, and limited view of what constituted intelligence, we began to grossly underestimate each other. This required that we create and fund more programs to care for the incompetence of those around us, and so the disintegration of communities has continued.
Along the same lines, as currency and productivity-based relationships replaced obligation-based relationships, the association of people driven by need became something that could easily be measured and reliably predicted. An individual’s worth now meant what that person could demand in the marketplace. The myth of economy being the basis of quality of life was built upon this foundation. Correlations were made between poverty and unhealthy behaviors leading to poor quality of life. Yet, there is much in evidence to question such a correlation. Clearly, it is healthy human interrelationships that produce strong economies and improved quality of life, not the reverse.
Churches, social clubs, athletic teams, professional business groups, educational institutions, and civic organizations are examples of environments where associational-functional groups are found. These groups are voluntary, recognize one another as associates, and are together for a purpose. As a rule they accept each other’s individual talents and encourage participation from all. Membership in these organizations tended to carry a great deal more weight/prestige/significance even three decades ago, but even they have been weakened but the lack of internal cross-functional relationships and external surrogates.
Nonetheless, by their nature, they still offer the most fertile bed for the regeneration of community well being in terms of cooperation and collaboration for the attainment of common goals. A process containing the above characteristics allows the community to define its needs and challenges, and proceed through the consequent transition to transformation, balance to imbalance, cycles. There are no set instructions, no rigid framework. If the group wishes to surmount the chosen challenge, they must decide the timeframe, method, plan of action, among themselves, and carry the plan through to fruition on their own. In all likelihood, disparate groups will discover similar goals and begin coordinating efforts resulting in a budding effect that will then follow its own progression through stability and instability. It is this process that will compliment, reinforce, and propagate what is begun within a few groups. The model will function as a process and will evolve with the community.
