What is Harmony?
Most people look at the world as it currently exists and think “we can do better than this.”
Many people from many backgrounds and movements have created language to describe their vision of “better.”
Impact. Sustainability. Resilience. Equity. ESG. Justice. Freedom. Liberation.
All of these concepts point toward where we want to go, but they don’t fully articulate where we are trying to go or how to get there in a way that sets the stage for collaboration between all of the people we need to actually achieve the vision.
We want to invite you to try on the way that we talk about the vision and path toward “better.”
We Want Harmony
What is Harmony?
On a personal level, Harmony is something we’ve all experienced but can’t quite define:
It's the sense of unspeakable perfection and meaning. It might be the realization that the winding road of life has led to the beautiful moment of now. Or when many voices become one choir, or when trusting our intuition leads to something magical, or we laugh or cry with a loved one, or something else altogether.
Simply put, Harmony is the sense of connection and alignment with our Self and Something Greater at the same time.
We want everyone to be able to experience and create from this felt sense of Harmony.
A Vision of Harmony
While it’s impossible to really put a finger on the essence of Harmony, we still need to be precise about what Harmony looks and feels like so that we can work together to make it real.
To do that we need a way to make sense of how we as humans connect and how those connections create our world & how we experience it. For this, we use our map of human connections that we call the 8 Nested Layers of Human Relationships.
This map helps us understand the scale and contours of human connections. Each layer has a life of its own, and each layer creates and is created by all of the others. This means that Harmony on one layer supports Harmony on the other layers.
In short, Harmony is not just a personal experience. Harmony is collective. And generative. When one person experiences Harmony inside of themselves, their actions can help create Harmony not just for other people but also on other layers. And creating Harmony on other layers can help individuals find Harmony within themselves.
Using this map, we can envision what Harmony across the layers of human connection looks and feels like:
This is the “better” world we want to create together.
The Path to Harmony
How do we make this vision of Harmony real? How do we make changes this big? People have different understandings of what elements need to be arranged to create at such a scale. Some folks think we need to rearrange governments, economies, and institutions, while others think we need to rearrange our values, practices, and mindsets.
We believe that in order to achieve our vision of Harmony, we need to go beyond arranging what we create to arranging the three fundamental forces that underlie how we create together: Power, Belonging, and Justice. Like Harmony, these forces have complex expressions and nuanced definitions. But, put simply:
Power is the ability to make choices and exert influence on the self or others.
Belonging is the state and experience of safety & legitimacy when using power in groups as well as the access to the abundance created by a group’s uses of power.
Justice is the creation of dignity and choicefulness for all people and beings through both, the repair of the historical misuses, and also, the ongoing rearrangement of power & belonging.
Without Power, we cannot create.
Without Belonging, we cannot create together.
Without Justice, we create discord.
Power, Belonging, and Justice, then, are fundamental to how and what humans create together.
If we carefully arrange Power, Belonging, and Justice across the layers of human connection, we can create harmony.
This is our work.
What Is Harmonize?
Harmonize is an effort to help people organize toward Harmony.
That is why we developed CODA™- Comprehensive Organizational Development and Analysis - our customizable suite of unique interventions that we’ve used to help hundreds of groups harmonize how they work together.
CODA™ addresses the three pillars of organizational alignment:
A Way of Being – Embodied Awareness
Our frameworks, tools, and practices that support our inner ability to access and act from Harmony.
A Way of Seeing – Power, Belonging, and Justice (PBJ)
Our lens to help us see how these forces act on us and increase the precision of our attempts to create and restore Harmony.
A Way of Working Together – Organizational Development
Our frameworks, tools and practices that help people form groups that embody and enact Harmony.
Want to learn more?
Sign-up for our free Info Session - Introduction to CODA: Liberating Organizations - Feb. 27
Stay tuned for our next blog on how CODA™ helps us achieve our vision of Harmony.
Humility and Gratitude
We recognize that we are a part of communities that all carry different parts of a shared vision and that have different ways of expressing that vision. We recognize that it is impossible to express that vision in its fullness. Our offering here is intended to create a shared context and language that can help us all see and know each other’s contributions more deeply, think more rigorously and precisely, and ultimately be more powerful and effective together. If you don’t feel like the way we articulate our vision has room for you or your insights, we want to know.
