Integral Political Will

Credits: Rope: New Africa / Group top left: Kzenon – Shutterstock / Group top right – Wikimedia / Woman-Panel: pressmaster – Adobe / Group bottom left – Martin Rausch

Integral Political Will – going deeper …

This is an edited version of the video on this page.

This is a pretty straightforward pattern. Political will in a fragmented and adversarial political system has a lot of: “Do you have the will to push this through in the battle against everybody else to get this in place?“

But we’re not trying to drum up the energy of one side to beat the others. There is a turning inside out here. This is actually a special application of another pattern titled “Generating Shared Orientation“. Everything in that pattern applies here. We want to generate shared orientation about the nature of our governance and its direction.

I would say political will is a systemic vector, because a vector is a directional force. Political will is about “What way is the whole system going to move?” From a wise democracy perspective, we want to have the whole system moving through its own internal organization and motivational dynamics rather than by somebody pushing the whole system or pulling the whole system or manipulating the whole system to get it to move in the particular direction they want it to move.

It is important to know here that political will is a factor – but it is not in any way a determinant of wisdom. Just like individual will, political will or the will of a political party or political leader – the fact that there’s will doesn’t necessarily mean that what someone’s trying to push is in any way wise. You can have political will pushing something that is totally destructive and unwise. So wisdom is an independent variable here from just generating integral political will.

But it IS a factor, because integral here means that we are bringing all the pieces of the puzzle together into this new directional force. We’re trying to bring the whole system together to orient the whole system. We are trying to build the capacity of the whole system to orient its whole “self”.

So a relevant question here is, Are we dealing with a single challenge, a single issue, a single opportunity of some kind that we are trying to muster people around – or are we actually developing practices and institutions that can help the whole system do that with every challenge it faces? So the pattern Integral Political Will can be an invitation to incorporate the capacity to generate integral political will into the whole system. If you have the whole system truly participating in developing integral political will, the chances are extremely good that the direction you will be going is wise because you have incorporated these different perspectives and all these different energies into something that they’re all buying into to move ahead.