Supporting collective processes in a diverse community

Auroville Today: What makes you passionate about your work?

Elvira: From my teenage years on, certain topics kept coming to me: leadership, conflict resolution, and our inner resources – how we turn things into fuel. I came to Auroville at 20, and the work found me. When I was about 30, someone interviewed me for a documentary. I was still searching for a professional purpose, and saying I felt half-baked and I hadn’t arrived yet. And the interviewer switched off the camera, and she said, ‘I know the thing for you,’ and told me about a four-month course in International Conflict Transformation in Germany.  And I looked it up and went ‘That’s it!’ I was a single mum with a four-year-old and it was quite expensive, yet, suddenly, everything fell into place in two weeks. And when I did that course, I really ‘arrived’. All the threads of my life, my passions, suddenly made sense and were a pattern. 

What are the skills you bring to the process as a facilitator?

Well, the first is really listening: listening to understand where people are coming from, what is driving comments and what is the need; and listening to find common ground. I also synthesise, and provide structure to support people to ask good questions and to use the tools of language to be precise and discerning. We tend to jump to solutions, without having gone through questions, such as what is the root cause of the issue. If that process is done well, then a sustainable solution will emerge by itself. Maybe not everybody will be happy at the end, but enough people will take responsibility for the next step in a healthy way so that those who don’t agree don’t feel the need to block, because they respect that the process happened in a certain way. 

What are the challenges of working in Auroville?

I see a larger culture of conflict avoidance, and also not being good at being in disagreement. We love to disagree, but without the refinement of a proper dialogue. We’re always in a certain stage of conflict, of trying to prove the other wrong. There’s a resistance to the naming of the negative aspects of the culture, and this is a huge block to working with it. If you look at social systems, there’s a hierarchy of principles – like a check list for diagnosis. The first one is to acknowledge what is there and accept it. If you can’t do that, you can’t work systemically or understand what the main pain point is. That’s one of my main challenges here. I have a feeling it comes, at least partly, from our spiritual aspirations, from aiming so high with the wonderful tool of Integral Yoga. People often say ‘We don’t need this kind of work. We have the yoga.’ So there’s this idea that if we do our inner work enough, then everything else will work out. For that to work, in my view, we’d all have to withdraw from each other for 10-12 years, and then we could get back together and try to do governance and see if there’s a great change. But we’re not there, and we haven’t found a way to do Integral Yoga collectively, so it needs this hybrid model approach. However, there’s a big resistance to that. 

Given that your work focuses on collective processes, that focus on the inner must be challenging?

Yes. The other challenge is diversity – the way we engage with each other is so different in each culture. In meetings, there can be thirty people with ten or fifteen very different cultural imprints. As a facilitator, what do you do? You always lose somebody, no matter what you do. And if you try to do a collective process that serves everybody, it’s not efficient. So, at the core of it, we’ve not done enough diversity work. We’ve adopted the phrase ‘unity in diversity’, but we trust too much in some miracle that will happen just because we are in Auroville.

What are the satisfactions?

We have seen the beginning of a culture shift in the last 10-12 years in the conflict work that the Koodam, Restorative Auroville and other initiatives have been doing. Many people can encounter conflict differently in their lives now, and look for restorative processes. So it has been a hugely satisfying and gratifying journey to be part of that shift, and to see a willingness to play and break patterns. It has been satisfying to train mediators and facilitators, and to work with the arbitrators. However, at the same time we now see a general pattern that when there’s conflict, people again revert to demanding justice, power, authority, and punitive measures. The question now is: how can Auroville cater to the need, yet stay true to our values and continue the cultural shift? 

What are your thoughts on what’s currently happening with the planning process for the Crown?

The Crown for me is just a symptom that indicates that we have not learned to use our diversities as a resource, and haven’t learned how to listen to each other and not ‘otherise’ each other. Agency has come from outside – a Secretary with a strong drive – and that triggered a response in our system around a topic, and it could have been any topic. And what we see is that we cannot listen to each other. If someone has a different opinion, they get labelled and put in a box. I haven’t ever before seen this level of disconnect or cracks in the social fabric of the community. There’s a feeling of ‘fronts’ and winners and losers, which is deeply unhealthy. How do we involve people in making decisions and building the environments they want to live in? What do we want to achieve by what we would call 

a participatory process? I suggest we want to achieve community, connection and ownership. Participatory processes can hold the qualities of connection and can give people the opportunity of an ‘and-also’ approach, not the ‘either-or’ which is a ‘winner-loser’ approach, so that we can ‘enlarge the cake’ as we say in mediation. Collaboration can happen when we meet each other as equals. Participatory processes can be a real leap in what we need to learn anyway as a community: how to work together in different parameters, rather than hierarchical top-down structures and the idea that there is one ‘true’ way. 

Are some groups taking that approach?

I see the whole discussion as very muddled as there are three ingredients posing road blocks to collaboration. Right now, there’s a mindset dominating the main groups that thinks there’s just one way of embodying the physical structure of the Galaxy plan on the ground and that we are in a rush. That mindset seems connected to a deep faith that we can make a spiritual leap if we build the Galaxy this way – and because it’s not happening, there is pain. Another ingredient is this group power structure, when people come into a role as a group member and want to become a saviour and ‘fix the mess’, but the idea of fixing things from the top-down doesn’t work anywhere in the world anymore. And another ingredient has to do with comfort zones of the community – the ‘let’s not rock the boat’ position, the idea that people want to stay out of the politics of the Town Hall. So there’s no community to speak of. I think these are the three main ingredients acting as road blocks to collaboration and connection right now: deeply held beliefs and the pain around those; power; and non-engagement. 

What about the TDC’s mode of operating, given that it claims to have a certain kind of legitimacy, which some see as coming more from above, rather than from the community?

Some people have been arguing that it’s illegitimate from a legal point of view, but to follow that track, then you need to take it to the legal world and get a decision from there. And I don’t think that’s the whole issue. We need to consider: why was the TDC structured like it is? It was structured like this to have some authority in relation to the outside world, not within Auroville. And so we come back to power dynamics and patterns again. It’s like we forgot that the TDC as a statutory body was created as an armour towards the outside. But power does not discern, so it attracts people who use power in a certain way. And right now, they’re using that power against the community, saying ‘You stay out, we have this “responsibility”’. So we have to talk about power, organisational memory, why was this entity created, what was the purpose, how are we using it today, and do we want that? 

Because, when people have extreme beliefs and have power, it’s easier to push things through. If you have a deep belief that one thing is the truth, you’re also attracted to power and vice versa. For me, the issue is not the TDC’s legitimacy, but how they hold power, and their purpose. Purpose is a really important question in systemic work. What’s the purpose of a team, the work, the survey? And we don’t ask that at all. The TDC says their purpose is to build the Crown as fast as possible. And that’s a questionable purpose in general – to build something as fast as possible, especially when it’s a road. 

You mentioned there’s an element of the community having to take responsibility for their own role in the creation of the problems. What role has the weak state of the Residents Assembly (RA) played?

What’s the chicken and what’s the egg? The RA is not strong, but you have to ask the question, why and what can we do to strengthen it? The RA has been disempowered by people in power by not putting energy into it. If the same amount of effort is put into reviving the RA and revamping how we work together as is being put into building the Crown right now, we’d have an empowered RA in two months. We could focus on that. Another ingredient is the lack of direct engagement expressed by someone at last Friday’s general meeting: ‘I want you to do this, and to inform me.’ If too many people in a community have that stance, what does that mean? We’re 2500 people, and we’re attempting something that would need to be run by 50,000, so can we afford to disengage?

Do you think this disengagement has created a certain environment for the Secretary to step into?

For me, she can be two things: she can be an incredible catalyst for everything that we’ve wanted to happen here. Or it can be really challenging.  It’s up to us how we ‘meet’ her, and who meets her. For me, it’s the image of a chemical catalyst: we are the chemical environment she’s coming into. It can either lead to a beautiful chemical reaction that overcomes an obstacle and leads to a transformation, or it can lead to an explosion. But that depends on the environment, not on her. It depends on us, and what formation we take with her amongst us. 

Has the community’s fairly ad hoc and improvised response to this issue had its drawbacks?

Yes, the ad hoc approach has few positives, except that people are engaged. People are now thinking how to make it less ad hoc. In organisational development, we talk a lot about agility or swarm intelligence, something that is not in boxes, but much more alive and organic, yet still synchronised and organised. For me, there are two dynamics going on in Auroville. One says, ‘We need to press ahead and we need to build this one physical imprint and we have no time and there are threats and urgency.’ And another dynamic says ‘No, we need to work together, take our time to work together and not hurt each other in the process of reaching our goal.’ We’re all looking at the same goal of human unity and a step in spiritual evolution, but the two sides have different ways. Around the world, it’s usually easier to speak in one voice on the one side that leans towards radical, black or white solutions. And the other side is just much more messy, because it’s participatory and there are many different voices and bubbles, and the process is the aim and that’s a more abstract goal. So this dynamic is at the centre of the ad hoc thing. 

I’m trying to listen to the different bubbles in this participatory movement, and to initiate that we talk to each other so we know what each bubble is doing so we can create synergy. The architects, for example, are starting to work together. There are a lot of good conversations. But we’re such a bunch of individualists, and there are too many leaders. And there’s often no time for good process: a lot of people work elsewhere, are very busy and don’t have a lot of spare time. 

However, through letting myself be involved in this, there’s a new community, new connections emerging around me. It’s magic, beautiful – you have this feeling of being held, of belonging.

Pull quote: 

“The key lies not in whether we are proficient at putting out fires, nor in whether we are adept at articulating our hopes. The key lies in whether we are capable of linking the potential in the crisis with the changes needed to move us toward the dream”. 

John Paul Lederach