At the World Ethic Forum (WEFo), more than 40 activists, artists, and practitioners have committed to an initial seven-year exploration. Together, as part of what we call the Firekeeper Circle, we are engaging with the following question:
How can radically shared aliveness, grounded in a culture of care and kinship, be enabled and put into practice across sectors, places, and disciplines? What are the collective practices and capacities required to do so?
This is not a light-hearted endeavour. It involves exploring the very core of how we do things, how we work, how we collaborate. It requires that we surface underlying and deeply ingrained structures and dynamics. In this complexity, we are also asked to see the diversity of our perspectives as a vital element to transcend the sense of separation and division that keeps being perpetuated.
Hence, for this exploration, one of the challenges we face is to identify methods that allow us to hold and reveal the full complexity of our question and the topics that arise along the way, including their more subtle manifestations, while allowing us to delve into the full potential of our exploration over time.
For this, we placed particular emphasis on two methods conceived by Kelvy Bird: Generative Scribing and Social Field Resonance. Together, they have formed the backbone of our collective learning and wisdom-making since the very start.
Generative Scribing: Making the Invisible Visible
Generative Scribing is a practice of deep listening with pen and paper. As dialogue and group process unfold, the scribe captures not only what is said, but also the atmosphere, the emotions, and the undercurrents of the conversation. Over time, a large-scale visual landscape emerges – a collective mirror of the group’s journey. In our case, this capture happens in the very room where the Firekeeping Circle process is taking place during our annual in-person gathering. The emerging picture is visible to all participants and is a vital element of our space-design and set-up. Thus, rather than a passive recording of what is happening, it is a dialogue between what unfolds in the group and what the scribe picks up between the lines. The principle of resonance is key. Over the several days of the gathering, this emerging visual mirror enables the Firekeepers to see and perceive the different levels of what is happening – including “themselves” – in a larger context, at the same time as the process is unfolding.
Every year since our first gathering, we have invited Marie-Pascale Gafinen to serve as generative scribe. Through her hands – and through her acting as a sensor for our unfolding process – a seven-meter-long roll of paper grows into a map of shared experience: grief acknowledged, hope voiced, questions raised, and possibilities imagined.
Engaging in this practice provides continuity from one year to the next, anchoring our seven-year arc, and creating a visual story of our exploration
Furthermore, as scribings from the previous years are hung in the room again, the practice generates a weaving together of our larger arc, reinforcing awareness of the entire journey.
Social Field Resonance: Listening to the Whole
If generative scribing externalises the process with all its tangible and subtle layers, Social Field Resonance invites the whole group to sense-make, relate to what has unfolded, and start to meaning-make. This is the first step towards drawing out nuggets of wisdom, important insights or aspects of what is happening, calling for more attention. In essence, it is a collective process for a group to become aware of its deep dynamics through embodied awareness.
Concretely, once or twice during each annual Firekeeper Circle Gathering, participants are invited to all stand/sit/lay before the scribed images, and enter into a moment of silence to bring themselves into presence. After this moment of attunement, everyone is invited to speak following a simple formula, with phrases starting either “I see …”, “I feel …”, or “I sense …”. Collective awareness manifests by everyone sharing their reflections, sometimes multiple times over. This creates a joint mosaic of perception, made up from the momentary snapshot of what stands out, what is specifically powerful, or what each Firekeeper weaves and associates together.
Repeated at each year’s gathering, this form of engagement transforms what could remain abstract and unspoken into shared, embodied clarity and commitments. Social Field Resonance has become an important collective practice for the World Ethic Forum, through which the collective capacities of joint presence, attuning to the subtle information “between the lines”, widening embodied awareness, going into a state of perception and tapping into collective wisdom are trained and come to light. Through this practice, we cultivate a field of shared insight, clarity and wisdom that our seven-year journey is designed to surface, make space for and tap into, in order to create tangible and context-sensitive contributions for the times we live in.
Why This Matters Now
Faced with today’s metacrisis, traditional forms of analysis and planning often fall short. What we need are methods that help groups sense, cohere, and act together over time. Generative Scribing and Social Field Resonance are methods which we employ to support us in bringing to light more subtle, emerging insights and impressions.
Those methods do not just capture what happens in a moment; they weave the threads of many moments into an emerging tapestry of wisdom and meaning-making, even over several years. By embedding them into the seven-year arc, WEFo ensures that what emerges each year is carried forward, layered, and deepened – building the kind of long-term wisdom needed for a regenerative future.
This blog is based on Ritter, L., Gyger, M., Sägesser, A., & Gafinen, M.-P. (2023b). Inquiry into Inclusive, Transformative Learning Processes for Knowledge and Wisdom Creation on Underlying Root Issues in Sustainability: Insights from the WorldEthicForum Convening 2023. In: Social Innovations Journal. Vol. 22 (2023). Transformative Partnerships: Proceedings of Transformations Conference ’23