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sources—global and specific: an abstract of A little red book about source

Peter Koenig explains that when someone welcomes an idea, intuition, or inspiration and begins taking an initiative and risks to achieve it, she’s creating a field. At this moment of creating the field, she becomes a source person. This is the playing field, the situation where her initiative develops into a project, enterprise, home, function, relationship. The field has its own shape, and its own boundaries that derive from the vision and values the source person discerns in her initiative. The field is like a living cell, and can be extended or contracted at will by the source person, depending on the project environment’s potential for development.

The source person who has created this field stays responsible for its development over the long term; we call her the global source to signify her responsibility for the field as a whole—both its spatial extent and its evolution over time. She’s the global source not by being the field’s owner (she may or may not be), but by being responsible. To be source is a service, not a proprietorship. A global source carries out this responsibility not least via the roles of entrepreneur, guide, and guardian.

To advance her initiative, the global source needs the support of other people who show up to offer help. These helpers arrive in different ways: attracted by the initiative’s energy and the global source’s passion, they may rush to join in, or following her intuition, the global source may take the initiative to offer them a role within her project.

In welcoming someone into the project, the global source offers them a place in her field: she designates a portion of the field that the new arrival may consider his own playing field, his own personal work space within the project’s field. In accepting this designation, he becomes the specific source of that part of the field, and from then on this new person will hold the full source responsibility for that part—which he’ll in turn carry out through the roles of entrepreneur, guide and guardian, always in line with the framework (the vision and values) that the global source has defined for the project. Because from the moment the global source transmits a part of her field to a specific source, this person too begins to receive source intuitions, ideas, and inspirations about this part of the field, along with the energy needed to realize them. With regard to the specific source’s patch of the field, however, the global source now no longer receives those gifts! Here we see the remarkable "source economy" that fully respects both the gift bestowed by the global source and the fundamental role of the specific source. Besides ensuring much greater efficiency in implementing the project, this transfer of intuitions from one person to another underlines the fact that source, although invisible, is something substantial.

Although a single project can accommodate numerous specific sources in the course of its development, there is only one global source for each first initiative, each project, enterprise, opera, house or relationship. Even if a team has been there from the beginning, it’s that one unique person who took the first initiative and the first risk. It sometimes takes several searches or interviews to find out who that person is, but it’s worth the trouble because if it’s not clear who the project’s global source is, then that source person is obviously in trouble—infected by source-denial disease or slacker syndrome (chapter 3). Also, this lack of clarity about the project’s source person leaves the field wide open for a source-usurper (infected by the tyrant’s disease) to trample over the terrain.

Having been entrusted with a part of the playing field, a specific source can then bring someone else into his own portion. Functioning as a kind of global source in relation to them in that context, the specific source welcomes others to his part of the whole, always maintaining the role of specific source relative to the project as a whole. In the final analysis, each person who collaborates on the project must be able to consider him- or herself the specific source of a part, no matter how large or small, of the field, and to invest in it by taking initiatives and risks, all the while receiving intuitions and clarifications on the next steps.

This cascading dissemination of sources, global and specific, functions as a network resembling a river delta. It constitutes the principal wealth of a project, uniting the different parts of the field with each other. It ensures their continuity and cohesion by providing a communal reference to the same global source, it takes advantage of a watershed of ideas and intuitions coming from all over, and it parcels out appropriate responsibility among its members. In a project where sources are well distributed, each has his own role and can spread his own talents.

(Stefan Merckelbach, A little red book about source, Chapter 4, 60-62).