Please take a walk with me down “memory lane.” It’s hard for me to believe that 15 years ago, a small group of friends sat with Barnett and me in our home to talk about the future of CMM. What came out of that meeting ultimately became the non-profit organization The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution.  It was Barnett who insisted we add “for personal and social evolution”. In one of his last chapters titled Evolution and Transformation: A Brief History of CMM and a Meditation on What Using it Does to Us, he says:

I think CMM is poised for its next big evolutionary leap, and that this leap will be (with suitable irony) a return to its first purpose:  to aid in the development of persons—and not just persons in general, but persons with a specific set of skills appropriate for the era in which we currently live.  CMM provides powerful tools for acting with increased phronesis (“practical wisdom”) in the world, and I hope the use of these tools will continue to spread.  But while we are using these tools, CMM does things to us; it changes in constructive ways the way we think and relate to others. In 1980 we described them as ‘optimally competent with respect to their own metatheoretical assumptions, scientific procedures, and the content of their beliefs’. Now I’m inclined to refer more broadly to “personal and social evolution.” ^[1]

In my own reflections on the past 15 years, I have taken the opportunity to revisit our Articles of Incorporation that were necessary in creating our non-profit status. Barnett played an integral part in writing the purpose statement for the Institute. It reads:

The specific purpose of this corporation is to develop, research, promote, and support traditions of thinking and communication based on the communication theory CMM (the Coordinated Management of Meaning) and to consult, mentor and train people to apply CMM in ways that advance compassion, empathy, and civility.

So much has happened in the world since Barnett wrote these words in 2010.  In a world of uncertainty, one thing is clear…Barnett’s voice and vision continue to guide us in the mission and purpose of the CMM Institute—to aid us, individually and collectively, in acting with increased wisdom, compassion, and civility into the very challenging, divisive, and polarizing times we are in.

The Zen teacher Zhaozhou provided this koan: Someone asked, “When times of great difficulty visit us, how should we meet them?”

The teacher said, “Welcome.”

Welcome in these times of unmooring does not come naturally or easily. Welcome implies an open hand, an open heart, an open mind, generosity—communicative turns that seek to co-construct generative ways of being in relationship with difficulty and difference. Welcome is not a forward or backward move, it’s an upward reconstituting move. And it’s a core commitment of the CMM Institute.

So, in the spirit of living into times of great pain and difficulty with welcome, here are some of the highlights of how the CMM Institute has spent our time and resources these past years to help advance personal and social evolution:

What I’ve described is not exhaustive of the work we are doing but I hope it provides some inspiration about what welcome might look like and mean in the times we are in.  The Stewards of the Institute are keenly aware that this work must never be done in isolation. Our “superpower” is in the quality of our relationships, individually and organizationally. We will continue to work diligently and mindfully in the coming years to fulfill the dream that Barnett and many of us have: To make the tools of CMM and the communication perspective widely accessible in hopes that they will spread and equip us for acting mindfully, wisely, and compassionately into our beautiful, complex, challenging and unfinished social and environmental worlds.

Please stay connected with us…

Sending my very best,

Kim Pearce

[1] Quote is taken from the 2012 edited book, The Reflective, Facilitative, and Interpretative Practices of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, pg. 17.