Research as Orientation
Wearing the "researcher hat" in a new way
The snippets continue: Day III of unfiltered, unpolished, and unedited thoughts!
Today, we held a group session focused on our collective decision-making process (for more of the technicalities on the process we use, listen to our very first podcast episode). This is the group technology that we use at the highest frequency in community life - every group session opens with what we call a “logistics space,” where we make decisions both big and small using a framework called Torus Technology.
Emma brought her necessity forward in order to create this session - one of her biggest areas of research here at Regenera, and in community life in general, is collective decision-making: what works, what doesn’t, what different frameworks have to offer, and how we might weave those threads together.
I almost wrote so that we can make decisions better together — and catching that word “better” is actually what I want to write about.
The idea that one way is better and another is worse is subjective, limiting, and pressure-filled for any field of inquiry. And, at the same time, the impulse to make something “better,” or to shift a process such that it is more easeful, more purpose-filled, and more life-serving, is a motivating and driving force for change. The possibility I want to offer for navigating this tension point is the one we are experimenting with at Regenera - can we, and what does it mean to, orient towards collective decision-making, and everything else, as research?
Research has been a big part of my identity, both now and in the past. For many years, it was my full-time job as an investigator. In that phase of my life (which continues in some ways now, both as I continue to freelance as an investigator, and broaden my scope of things that I can investigate), my orientation was fundamentally problem-shaped: a client comes to me in two circumstances: either there is something they don’t have that they want, or there is something that they have or is happening that they don’t want. My job was to find and share information that bridged the gap - from problem to solution, from current reality to desired outcome. The research itself was the infrastructure connecting those two points.
I am still shaking off the impact of this framing. When Emma brought collective decision-making to the group, I noticed that there is a part of me that wants to attach the same problem/solution set up: our current style of decision-making has problems, and I want to make it work better. Research as repair.
But something shifts when I let go of that frame.
When I orient to collective decision-making (or community living, or being here at Regenera, or really life overall), as research, every moment of the process comes alive.
The old map of research: there is a problem, and I must collect information to solve it.
The new map: how present, conscious, and aware can I be of what is actually happening right now? How can I document, record, or simply make transparent what is unfolding - and then move into creation from a place of resource, of information, of things brought into the open?
If I embrace research as my orientation - to collective decision-making, to relating, to community life - then every moment can carry purpose. Every experience becomes an opportunity, if I’m willing to bring the values and principles I want to guide my inquiry.
The old fuel source for research was problem-solving. The battery of my personal research machine ran on right or wrong.
What if the fuel becomes curiosity, openness, being with, and a genuine desire to create?
Then I can wear my researcher hat in a way that opens rather than narrows - that revitalizes and imbues every moment of life with meaning, rather than reducing experience to a series of problems awaiting resolution.
I am now able to revisit our framing of Regenera as a laboratory with an increased experiential understanding. We are here researching how to create and sustain regenerative culture, on a personal, interpersonal, and systemic level, so that we can serve life, live in purpose and being together, and empower others to open to the same.