Speaking Body Language

Before a critical meeting with your boss, an important customer; or your teenage son or daughter, do you spend time mentally roughing out and revising what you are going to say? If so, you are misdirecting your energy. Spend time instead practicing how to walk, stand, sit and quickly grasp how other people are moving their bodies.

When it comes to research on power, there is plenty of evidence on the importance of body posture and tone of voice.  That research indicates that it isn’t the quality of an argument that will persuade people. It is rather how the protagonist conveys it. Our status is determined by physical attributes and nonverbal cues. People decide if we are competent in less than 100 milliseconds.

Neither is intelligence a strong predictor of leadership. The pitch, volume and pace of your voice affect what people think you said about five times as much as the actual words you use. We are, however, impressed with our own arguments. So, it sometimes pays to repeat back to someone you are trying to impress, what he or she said.

In order to prepare for authority issues in the job market; MBA students now team up with drama teachers, who help them practice. Actors, it turns out, are exceptionally good at paying attention to other actors. The idea is that MBA graduates avoid getting into professional or personal trouble later in their careers, because they don’t know how to be deferential to other people when it is appropriate. Or, not knowing how to take charge when that is called for.

There are times, when you want to play 'low' status'; which means you are making the relationship work and not necessarily giving anything important away. 'Playing low' can lift others up and make them feel good about themselves. For 'high-status' people in an organization, telling a self deprecating joke can make you more approachable. 

Many of us know the boss who says: “My door is always open,” but their body language adds “but really, don’t come in here.” In facing a subordinate who doesn’t know he or she is a subordinate, a few extra moments of silence can send the right signal.

Your posture affects you as well as other people. Try this: sit down, press your knees together, hold your elbows close to the sides and lean forward. While in that position say: "I am totally in charge." You will probably find it incongruous and won't believe your own words. But, if you were to lower your shoulders, drape an outstretched arm over the back of a chair and spread your legs wide; taking up more space - now that would feel different.

High-status people generally let their bodies take more space than low-status people. That alone makes them both appear and feel relaxed. Like others, you probably know this on your gut level. There is a body language of power, and we know it. But, we don't know we know it.

Playing With Perception

All of us want to affect the world for the better. We look around us and see problems - crime, pollution, child abuse - and because we're a society of rules, we believe that laws and religious commandments will help us make changes. For example, we elect legislators who pass more and more laws every year in the hopes that these rules will make citizens' lives better. By contrast, the ancient Greeks were a people of the concept - they knew that there was nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Because they manipulated ideas so elegantly, they were able to invent democracy, develop philosophy and systematize mathematics. 

Their Roman neighbors, on the other hand, were great lawmakers; and Roman codes have influenced many modern Western laws. When faced with problems, the Greek philosophers conceptualized new systems; while the Romans called on their armies to enforce the precepts. The wisdom practitioners of the indigenous world, however, don't live by rules or ideas. If they want to change their world, they don't pass new laws or come up with new theories. Instead, they choose to change the way they perceive a problem. By changing their perception, they transform a challenge into an opportunity. 

It enables them to change their perceptions and 'dream' their world into being; experiencing events in such a way, that they no longer take life personally. At this level of perception, things no longer happen to you; they simply happen. It doesn't rain on you to make you wet; it simply rains. When you change your perception of the events you experience, you also alter the way these situations live within you. You are no longer the cause or the effect of anything, and you sense a tremendous relief because the world is exactly as it should be - and it doesn't need you to fix it. 

In the West, we tend to associate our perception with the dozens of states of awareness we're familiar with. For example, we're in one mode of awareness when we're just waking up or drifting off to sleep, another when we're in reverie; another when we're enraged, and so on. In each one, a different part of the brain is active - so we refer to them as 'states of consciousness', which are products of the mind. Perceptual levels, on the other hand, exist independently of the mind. 

There are four perceptual levels in the indigenous world. These levels correspond to the four domains of manifestation: the physical world (our body), the realm of thoughts and ideas (mind), the realm of myth (soul) and the world of spirit (energy). These perceptual levels are associated with the four energetic bodies that make up the human energy field. They're stacked inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, with the physical body innermost, the mental body enveloping and informing the physical shell; the soul enveloping the mental and physical, and the spiritual body outermost, informing and organizing them all like a blueprint. 

When we shift from one level of perception up to the next, we retain our ability to function at the lower realm; but we have a much wider view of what we're experiencing. Its like the old story about a traveler who comes across two stonecutters. He asks the first, "What are you doing?" and receives the reply, "Squaring the stone." He then walks over to the second stonecutter and asks, "What are you doing?" and receives the reply, "I am building a cathedral." In other words, both men are performing the same task, but one of them is aware that he has the choice to be part of a greater dream. 

Albert Einstein once said that, the problems we face in life cannot be solved at the level where they were created. To that end, being able to shift to a higher realm of perception can help us find solutions to our problems; whereas before we were only experiencing distress and separation. In this way, we learn that there's a solution to every problem we encounter in the physical world; in the mind and in the soul. We learn that we can't eliminate scarcity in our lives by getting another job, or heal feelings of abandonment or anger by understanding our childhood wounds. We can only fix these problems at the level above the one they were created in.

Pricing Invulnerability

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work; where she has spent the past 10 years studying courage, shame and authenticity. Here she discussses how, in our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times - joy. This talk will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships - and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning.

 

Towards The Partner State

Can we learn something about the politics of the new mode of value creation, something that would be useful not just for particular communities, but to society in general? Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, which may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy? The answer has to be an emphatic yes, supporting the argument that society is witnessing the emergence of a new model for the state. A peer-to-peer (P2P) state, if you will.

In the emerging institutional model of peer production, most visibly in the free software industry, we can distinguish an interplay between three partners: (i) a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design; (ii) an entrepreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons; and (iii) a set of for-benefit institutions which manage the infrastructure of cooperation. There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players. The contributors create the user value that is deposited in the shared innovation commons of knowledge, design and code.

The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation, which makes the project collectively sustainable. For example the Wikimedia Foundation collects the funds to support the server space without which access to the Wikipedia would become impossible. The entrepreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors sustainable by providing an income; and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.

Amazingly though, current contributor communities are not democracies. Why is that so? Very simply, because democracy, the market and hierarchy are modes of allocation of scarce resources. In hierarchy, our superiors decide; in the market prices decide; and in a democracy ‘we the people’ decide. But, where resources are abundant - as they are with immaterial knowledge, code and design - communities contain the type of power that is meritocratic, distributed and everyone can contribute without permission. However, such a ‘permissionlessness’ requires expertise, not communal consensus. Peer production solves this tension in an elegant way a la Wikipedia.

What is the relationship between this entrepreneurial coalition and the commons from which they derive their value? The coalition supports the individual commoners in their livelihood, and may contribute to the for-benefit institution as well. For example, IBM pays salaries to the developers contributing to the Linux pool, and it supports the non-profit Linux Foundation, with subsidies. In this way, they co-produce and sustain the commons on which their success is built. Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies, in the same way that Visa is an economic joint venture of a set of financial institutions. The point is that, even with shareholder companies the community's value creation is at the core of the process; it is in other words, already an ethical economy.

Peer production also rests on the often-costly infrastructure of cooperation. There would be no Wikipedia without the funding for its servers, no free software or open hardware without similar support mechanisms. This is why open source communities have created a new social institution: the for-benefit association. It’s an important social innovation because, unlike classic non-profits or non-governmental institutions, they do not operate from the point-of-view of scarcity. The new for-benefits only have an active role in enabling and empowering the community to cooperate by provisioning its infrastructure, not by commanding its production processes. These associations exist for the sole purpose of benefitting the community of which they are the expression.

Now, what shall we call an institution that is responsible for the common good of all the participants; in this case, not the inhabitants of a territory, but of people involved in a similar project? This type of for-benefit institution has a very similar function to what we commonly assign to the state. Can we then, imagine, a new type of partner state? The Partner State, first theorized by Italian political scientist Cosma Orsi, is a state form that enables and empowers the social creation of value by its citizens. It protects the infrastructure of cooperation that is the whole of society. It does on a territorial scale, what the for-benefit institutions do on a project-scale.

Such a Partner State already exists, at least in a local embryonic form as the city of Brest. Michel Briand, assistant to the Mayor, and his team of city workers had a brilliant idea: why not use the virtual, to enhance physical social life in the city? The team created local versions of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, helped local associations develop a online presence, invested heavily in training; and even had a physical library where citizens could borrow production material. One of their projects was the revitalization of old smuggling trails in order to attract the hiking crowd. So, they decided to 'virtually’ enrich the trails.

And here is where their social innovation comes in: the city council did not do by substituting themselves to the citizenry (i.e. state provisioning), nor did they ask the private sector to carry this out (privatization or public-private partnerships). No, what they did was to enable and empower local teams of citizens, to create added value. Locally, the town of Stellenbosch has rolled out free Wi-Fi through crowd-sourced donations. There are of course other examples to mention as well. The Austrian region of Linz has declared itself a Commons Region; the city of Naples has created "An Assistant to the Mayor on the Commons" position, and San Francisco city council has created a Commission to promote the sharing economy.

Open source models show us a new possible reality, a model where the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit:

⁃ At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on.
⁃ These commons are enabled and protected through non-profit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, who then empower and enable that social production.
⁃ Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies - whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities - and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximizing profit at any cost.

Where the three circles intersect, there are the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems. The only thing left to do is to have an answer to the crucial question: how does global governance look like in P2P civilization? We need to transform the global material empire, which at present dominates world affairs for the benefit of a few, and redesign the ineffectual global institutions that are presently inadequate to deal with global challenges. While peer production will undoubtedly also emerge as a drive for resilience in bad times, a really thriving commons-based society requires a Partner State: a network of democratically run for-benefit institutions that protect the common good on a territorial scale.