Launching Common Light
A new consultancy for renewing human agreements
I’m excited to launch Common Light, a new consultancy working to help organizational leaders cultivate contemplative capacities for ecosystem-wide flourishing. Rooted in transdisciplinary research, diverse wisdom traditions, and fifteen years of experience across private, nonprofit, and public sectors, Common Light works with individuals, teams, and organizations to align their activities with a shared, higher order purpose. Through self-observation and experiential learning, we facilitate a process of co-discovery and -becoming that clarifies strategic aims in light of our collective capacities to thrive.
Common Light begins from the recognition that within everyone, regardless of background or belief system, lies an infinite source of creativity—a light that illuminates our world and helps us navigate life’s challenges. This creativity can reveal what we all share but express differently—purpose—the knowing of what is yours to do. When we recognize our purpose, we can invite others into it, the contributions needed to achieve that purpose, how those contributions add to the lives of those serving their own purpose through these contributions, and how this serves our shared outcomes. Creativity thus illuminates an ecology of purpose, a common light amongst everyone touched by you and your organization, available to be resourced.
All entities—be they individuals, teams, or organizations of any type (nonprofit, for-profit, or governmental)—can respond to their ecology of purpose along a spectrum of abundance. At one end of experience, we can assume maximal abundance and work to invite, integrate, and deliver upon the shared purposes by tapping into our mutual creativity. At the opposite end, we can assume extreme scarcity and deny our collective creativity, viewing others as replaceable parts in a machine. The abundance mindset keeps us engaged, energy efficient, and aware of others’ wellbeing, including that of the natural world. The scarcity mindset disengages our creativity, drains our energy, and fundamentally disregards the needs of others and our environment.
Our responses to the realities of our purpose—whether we perceive abundance or scarcity in our relationships—are expressions of our underlying agreements. Agreements are the explicit and implicit assumptions that shape our interactions with others, influencing our experiences and outcomes. In all our endeavors—from launching a product to revising giving strategies or engaging communities—we operate under agreements that shape our understanding of self, others, groups, nature, and the creative spirit. The nature of our agreements, whether we’re conscious of them or not, orients us in our experience and influences how we perceive and engage with the world. Recognizing these agreements also reveals our capacity to change them. Choice. Opting for abundance-based agreements allows us to contribute more to nature and others than we take, ultimately creating more value in the world.
Fortunately this isn’t just theory—leaders worldwide are already demonstrating leadership rooted in abundance. In the corporate sector, Thorlo, a thriving sock manufacturing firm from North Carolina, has empowered their employees to work without supervisors, tying their contributions to the long-term foot health of their customers. In the cooperative sphere, the Vermont-based Brattleboro food co-op has been building a place-sourced regenerative economy by aligning their activites to support the growth of local farmers, landowners, and food processors. In the political realm, Paris has established a permanent civic assembly that draws upon the insights of its residents’ from all walks of life to write new laws together. And in the nonprofit sector, GiveDirectly has discovered that trusting people with direct cash transfers is far more effective at addressing poverty than traditional global development programs. In each of these cases, organizations are realizing that purpose is best advanced when it serves the needs and purposes of others. These examples illustrate how abundance-based thinking can lead to innovative and effective practices regardless of sector, benefiting the organizations, communities, and natural systems they serve.
Abundance-based practices are often overlooked though because they can be mistakenly viewed as mere novelties, isolated achievements, or unrealistic visions of a distant future. However, a closer examination of these real-world examples reveals the potential for similar sustained perspective changes in each of us in the present. Researchers from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business have been documenting real-world cases of people shifting to a perspective of abundance, showing that possibilities live within reach of everyone at all times. “Ecosynomics" research has found that a scarcity-based mindset often fails to recognize or dismisses as anomalies these possibilities, largely because it is unfamiliar with the workings of our innate potential to freely develop new capacities. Facts are misread as fantastical. As the management educator Peter Drucker observed:
“The trends that I have described ... are not forecasts (for which I have little use and scant respect); they are, if you will, conclusions. Everything discussed here has already happened; it is only the full impacts that are still to come. I expect most readers to nod and to say, ‘Of course’. But few, I suspect, have yet asked themselves: ‘What do these futures mean for my own work and my own organisation?'”
Common Light aims to help leaders and organizations create their futures without limiting themselves to the perspectives of their time. Only a genuine admiration for what is not yet in existence allows us to co-create something original. This originality helps us work from our futures, via our creativity, towards our present. By creating space to comprehend what exists yet remains unfamiliar and to act on this newfound awareness together, we bring people to collectively experience their source of creativity, purpose, agreements, and choice in the context of their potential to enable ecosystem-wide flourishing. We do this through three modes of engagement:
Investigations of Experience (Mind): A rigorous study of one’s experience, including the experiences of others and the ecological conditions from which one acts, complemented by immersive learning experiences and exchanges with leaders already working from a place of abundance.
Movements in Experience (Hands): A purposeful realignment and concrete execution of one’s newfound abundance-based agreements, bringing to real-world expression what is both ours and others to do.
Contemplation of Experience (Heart): A consciously cultivated connection to the creative source of each of the previous two engagements, building a new reflective and proactive capacity to experience the world with heart.
Common Light is not a technical consultancy. We do not conduct studies, manage campaigns, or draft legislation. Our purpose is cultivating new capacities within our collaborators. To achieve this, we support leaders and organizations across three areas of organizational activity:
Strategic Planning: We help partners align their activities with impact through an introspective strategic planning process, creating purposeful agreements that benefit the stakeholder ecosystem and lead to measurable and meaningful outcomes.
Philanthropic Giving: We guide philanthropists or social impact teams in aligning their values and resources with regenerative projects, adding value to the ecosystem by resourcing new capacities within it.
Stakeholder Convening: We support teams to organize and facilitate strategic stakeholder gatherings that aim to breakthrough divisions and produce original outcomes, moving the dial by incorporating all perspectives.
If you’re interested in exploring how experiencing the world with more abundance can help you achieve better outcomes, there are a few ways to collaborate with us here:
If you are an organizational leader or individual wanting to learn more about our services, schedule a free consultation here
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In the spirit of Common Light’s purpose to resource a revival of agreements, I leave you with a question posed by community peacemaker and founder of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation Orland Bishop: “For the love of what future do you give your will?”
May we contemplate this question together.