Cycle of Kairotic Flow

Before we get to the video, I wish to draw your attention to three dynamic aspects of the Kairotic Flow, which I regard as far more important for understanding and application than are the six Archetypes. Two of these aspects became the name, and the third sits right at the centre of the diagram.

Flow (of power)

What comes to mind for you when you think of the word "power"?

Is it negative, like “power over” and “power corrupts”? Positive — like "self-empowered" or "power with"? Neutral, or both, or both-and-more?

I’m asking this because my use of the word ‘power’ in talking about Kairotic Flow has been a regular topic of discussion with others over the past 3 years, and no doubt such discussions will continue far into the future. I do fully acknowledge that ‘power’ has discomfiting connotations for many people nowadays. (And as an amusing side note — when I tried using Notion’s AI to summarise my own notes on Kairotic Flow, even it refused to go along with what I meant by "power"!)

However, the way I understand power is so central to the Kairotic Flow concept that at one point I even included the word in its name: “The Kairotic Flows of Power Cycle”. I did concede that the word didn’t need to be in the name, but even after many discussions and hours of searching and contemplation, I’ve not found a viable alternative to express the concept of power, and rehabilitating the word — or at least trying to — feels like the only sensible option.

So. If the word "power" has entirely negative connotations for you, and you’ve already made it this far, I can only ask that you bear with me just a little while longer to finish reading this section and see how I’m using it, and then on that basis, choose whatever course of action is right for you.

If there’s one principle I’m proposing that I hope everyone remembers about Kairotic Flow, it’s this: Power only gets corrupted when it accumulates and stagnates (by which I mean that too much power stays for too long in one Archetypal structure). Power is not inherently corrupted or corrupting… but it does have to flow through the cycle as it is needed. Like electricity, or like the energy we get from eating and digesting food. Power is energy in motion, doing work.

And now, if you’re curious to learn more, please continue.

If, however, you’re convinced that I’m totally wrong about the nature of power and believe it is always evil or corrupting, regardless of how it is viewed or treated, then I would suggest/advise that the Kairotic Flow is probably not your cup of tea, at least for now.

Kairos

The ancient Greeks had three concepts for time: Chronos, Aion and Kairos.

Chronos is clock time, evenly divided in hours, minutes, seconds. You see it show up in words like “chronological” and “chronometer” and “chronic”.

Aion represents a very long, cyclical view of time (an age, epoch or eon).

Kairos is living time, seasonal and cyclical, judged not by duration, but by its importance and value. Kairos is the opportune or defining moment.

The adjective “Kairotic” comes from Kairos.

The Kairotic Flow points to the opportune moment for power to move or flow from one Archetypal Phase to the next in the cycle, as determined by living context. It’s about timing and necessary sequence or order of events.

Here’s what I mean by that. We humans define Spring as starting on a particular day in the calendar (chronological) year, but trees and plants don’t care about what month or day of the year it is. They start flowering when their living conditions and their internal states show them it’s the ‘opportune moment’ for them to do so. Not a moment before, not a moment after.

Tension

When we make choices, we’re nearly always making some kind of trade-off between opposites, which exist in a natural and inevitable tension. More of Option A means less of Option B and vice-versa.

In common parlance, we say we can’t have our cake and eat it too.

Do we buy a new car, or repair the one we already have? (Pioneer ↔ Steward)

Do we optimise a process we have tested a bit, or do we reconsider whether the process actually does what we want it to do? (Settler ↔ Curator)

Do we develop a routine around an approach we have been using for a while, or do we look for other approaches that might better meet our needs? (Town Planner ↔ Scout)

The choices we make in our lives might be carefully considered or the automatic result of blind habit, but the trade-offs are always there. Being aware of those trade-offs in the context we’re in helps us to find the right balance and make wiser choices.

We could think of finding the right balance as something like tuning a violin or guitar string. The string is held in two places and tightened / tensioned at one end of the instrument until it vibrates at the desired pitch or tone. Too much tension and the pitch is sharp (too high). If more and more tension is applied, the string eventually breaks. Too little tension and the tone is flat (too low). If the string has so little tension applied to it that it’s loosely flopping around, it won’t generate coherent sound at all.

When the tension is truly resolved and the choice fully made and actioned, we move on to the next Phase of activity in the cycle.

Orange and purple

You may have noticed that that the first option presented in all three tension questions above is the one on the orange side of the Kairotic Flow cycle.

I’ve done this to highlight the choices we tend to make in today’s world, where power in nearly every form is stuck on the orange side of the cycle, which we associate with economic growth. Our social institutions, and in particular, market and ‘state’ (the word I use to point to formal government institutions) structures and incentives, were created to facilitate these choices and activities, all of which are in one way or another immediately and obviously important to getting us the resources we need to live.

Now I want to draw your attention to the critical importance of the purple side activities, which those same social institutions frequently try to minimise as costs or annoyances (or unproductive/lazy fun), and typically regard as having no immediate or obvious value.

Consider:

1. If you intend to jump a long way, prior to actually jumping you (probably without even thinking about it) take at least a few steps back so you can build forward momentum by running up to the point you’ll jump from.

2. If you intend to sort out a big mess in a storage closet or cabinet, it helps to first take everything out, remove things that don’t belong there, and then reorganise the rest in a way that better meets your needs.

Plants display the importance of the purple side of the Kairotic Flow, dropping off old leaves and branches which no longer fulfil their purpose, and sending appropriate nourishment to where new growth is needed.

To summarise, the Phases of activity represented by the Archetypes on the purple side are preparation for the activities on the orange side. They may look like costs in the short term, but in the longer term, they’re making the value we collect during orange side activities possible.

I would suggest our world is in the mess it’s in now largely because we’ve collectively been undervaluing, under-resourcing, ignoring and/or avoiding the purple side of the cycle.

Kairotic Flow is a map of the patterns of life

If you look around at the natural world, you see this full Kairotic Flow cycle playing itself out everywhere, because life adapts to the nature of its environment, of the inevitable consequences of the way our world spins on its axis and travels around the sun. There is no summer without winter, no harvest without pollination, and no pollination without the directing of energy away from the no-longer-viable structures (like old leaves and branches) and towards the potential for building new structures in wherever the new best place is, to suit current conditions.

Life changes continuously as it learns and adapts to its continuously changing environment. Nora Bateson’s word symmathesy describes this mutual learning beautifully.

The complexity of relationships continually changing - dynamic interrelating - is as real as real can be. Maps and models and the institutions we create are often useful to us, but on the most fundamental level they are all wrong, all disconnected from reality the second we create them.

The Kairotic Flow is no exception to this rule, since it too is a map of sorts. It does however attempt to describe what seem to me to be eternal patterns of life that play out over and over again in multiple contexts. If I’ve succeeded in this, the usefulness of the Kairotic Flow map rests largely in our abilities as living creatures to sense what’s going on around us and, using our pattern-matching abilities, respond accordingly to what’s happening now and what’s needed next, rather than getting lost in our own creations and trying to impose them on reality.

There is no starting point to the cycle - we simply are where we are - however given the current state of the world, I often introduce the Archetypes in this order: Steward, Curator, Scout, Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner. My sense of the bigger whole-of-humanity picture right now is that we need to pay more attention to what we already have and what's no longer working for us, and figure out what is needed next.