An interview with Meg Wheatley talking about her book, Perseverance.
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FollowThe Circle Way- a Leader in Every Chair
A couple of recent experiences reminded me again of how dreadful meetings can be without some process and without someone hosting the conversation. I realize that I have been blessed and spoiled by working with so many skilled hosts through The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter. I have almost come to take good hosting for granted and am surprised by some of the patterns of conversation that seem to surface when there is not conscious attention given to hosting. And then I am reminded of the modeling that is provided by radio and TV talk shows on which participants are encouraged to eschew civility and listening and to aggressively pursue their personal agendas.
In a group where we were debriefing one of these meetings, I began to share some of the simple patterns and practices that are illuminated by PeerSpirit, the work of Christina Baldwin and Ann Linea. They have written the book The Circle Way and they lead practica in using the circle as an archetypal pattern for communication.
I hope that I will have even more to share about the Circle Way after I sit in an Advanced Circle Practicum later this week. Two questions are very alive in me as I go to this training. I want to learn to be more aware of the energy in a circle and to be more skilled in shifting the energy. My other question is related to several recent experiences: why is it that people are afraid to offer even simple processes that could significantly improve conversation? How can we begin to develop a culture of hosting good conversations and to change our expectations that meetings need to be dreadful to one of expecting the magic of meaningful conversation? If I get usable answers to these questions, my time will have been well spent.
Christina and Ann have distilled the essence of The Circle Way into a beautiful two-page summary that I am going to begin sharing and recommending with anyone responsible for “running” a meeting.
Here is an interview with Christina and Ann for my fellow audio-learners and for anyone interested in going beyond the two-page essence but not yet ready to tackle the book:
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Posted in Hosting
Tagged Art of Hosting, Audio, Christina Baldwin & Ann Linea, circle
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How Language Shapes Thought ~ Lera Boroditsky
Language does shape thinking. This is true of the structure of a language as well as the vocabulary and an individual’s discourse. I have had a strong intuition of this, wondering about the effect of gender associations in other languages and about how language shapes our concepts and experiences of time. This amazing lecture presents the current scientific understanding with the strong implication that we can change our thinking by changing our language. This supports the tenets of my ontological coaching:
- Our actions are determined by our view of the world, by the filters through which we construct our reality.
- Our world view is embodied in language (as well as moods, emotions and the body).
- Awareness of language use, recognition of other possibilities and changes in language can have profound changes in the possibilities that are available.
Posted in Ontology
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A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework
A simple explanation of the cynefin framework for understanding the distinctions between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. I find this a very useful framework for looking at organizational issues and problems and determining appropriate responses.
Ecological Intelligence
Ecological intelligence is a relatively new term coined by Daniel Goleman in his book by the same name. The ability to see systems and to make decisions with an awareness of systems consequences is key to ecological intelligence and to sustainable leadership. Systems thinking involves both horizontal skills and vertical qualities of sustainable leadership.
We live and work in an interconnected web of relationships. The old Newtonian models of physics that imagine organizations and systems to be machine-like and predictable have been replaced by models from biology and complexity theory that emphasize interconnectedness. That effect of a butterfly’s wings upon weather has become a classic illustration of complexity and interconnectedness. In our global economy this interconnectedness is seen throughout business and financial systems. The ability to see systems and to recognize interconnectedness is an essential skill even in the smallest and simplest organizations. Noted business consultant and thinker Richard David Hames has said that “leaders need an understanding of business ecosystems but we tend not to be eco-literate.”
Models of healthy ecosystems or of a healthy body provide more useful ways of looking at modern systems. In these natural systems, changes occur continually through adaptation and evolution. Healthy systems constantly adapt to changing conditions without anyone in charge of the process and without reliance upon elaborate plans and time lines. Effective change happens when there are clear communication and feedback systems and a clear purpose and when there is encouragement for innovation and self-correction.
The role of a leader changes when systems are seen as self-organizing, living ecosystems rather than machines that need prediction and control. Leaders in sustainable organizations need the horizontal skills and the vertical attributes of ecological intelligence. Fortunately, these are skills and attributes that can be developed. Specifically, leader needs the horizontal skills of developing group intelligence and of strategic navigation. She or he also needs the vertical attributes of courage, mindfulness and a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
Hames says that global leadership is a “collective phenomenon” and Goleman says “… the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far flung networks” (Ecological Intelligence p. 48). An ecologically intelligent leader needs a whole set of related skills for developing group intelligence. These skills include the ability to create a culture of learning, the ability to host conversations that allow group wisdom to emerge and not to be stifled by the opinions of someone in charge, and the ability to develop systems for harvesting the wisdom of the group and transforming it into tangible business systems. A couple of resources for developing skills in group intelligence include the “Art of Hosting Conversations That Matter” and the book, “The Tao of Democracy” by Tom Atlee.
A second set of skills for ecological intelligence concerns decision making. A Newtonian organization that relies upon systems of prediction and control has a need to eliminate all uncertainty and deviation. Natural systems, however, rely upon diversity and a more natural or organic process of adapting to changing conditions. For example, no one needs to tell a plant to reduce its surface area to conserve water during a drought. Similarly, an ecologically intelligent leader will facilitate the development of systems that encourage everyone’s voice and input into decision making that adapts naturally to changing condetions. These systems will encourage innovation and they need to be supported by metrics and feedback systems to recognize consequences and to correct the course as needed. One such approach to decision making, “dynamic steering”, is a key component of the business approach called “holacracy”.
The vertical axis skills of group intelligence and strategic navigation must be balanced by horizontal leadership characteristics. An ecologically intelligent leader must have a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Peter Senge refers to this as being a “learner” rather than a “knower”. Hames calls strategic navigation that “acceptance of uncertainty rather than creating systems to try and create certainty”. Traditionally leaders have been expected to have the answers and this has often been how they were evaluated and rewarded. Today, leaders who have the answers can be a barrier to the development of a collective intelligence so new leaders need to be willing to live in the place of unknowing and to embrace ambiguity. For some leaders this will mean letting go of old and deeply held ways of being including a belief in black and white or right and wrong ways of looking at issues. Many of the practices of mindfulness and emotional intelligence will support a leader in learning to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity.
Another basic attribute of an ecologically intelligent leader is the ability to be still, to be present and to listen deeply for emergent group intelligence. This requires an ability to tolerate silence and to ask reflective questions such as “what is it that we have learned from this failed attempt”. This requires an ability to see beyond the immediate situation and to sense larger systems and the longer term implications. This also requires the courage to be present and to mindfully consider a situation rather than impulsively reacting with a desire to fix or control it. Such responses are grounded in a mood of curiosity and wonder rather than fear and control. Like the comfort with uncertainty, these abilities of an ecologically intelligent leader to have personal practices that nurture these ways of being.
In summary, one of the basic intelligences of a sustainable leader is ecological intelligence. Like the other intelligences of a sustainable leader, the horizontal leadership skills can be developed and will need to be supported by personal work on the vertical axis.
Posted in Earth/Ecology, Reflection
Tagged Daniel Goleman, Earth, Ecology, intelligence
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Human Planet
Here is another Earth Day offering, this one focusing on the amazing diversity of human experience as we relate to our planet.
Posted in Video
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Earth
An Earth Day tribute to our mother. What an incredible planet we are part of. I am filled with gratitude and awe.
Dwelling in Uncertainty ~ Meg Wheatley
Some people despair about the darkening direction of the world today. Others are excited by the possibilities for creativity and new ways of living they see emerging out of the darkness.
Rather than thinking one perspective is preferable to the other, let’s notice that both are somewhat dangerous. Either position, optimism or pessimism, keeps us from fully engaging with the complexity of this time. If we see only troubles, or only opportunities, in both cases we are blinded by our need for certainty, our need to know what’s going on, to figure things out so we can be useful.
Certainty is a very effective way of defending ourselves from the irresolvable nature of life. If we’re certain, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in the strange puzzling paradoxes that always characterize a time of upheaval:
– the potential for new beginnings born from the loss of treasured pasts,
– the grief of dreams dying with the exhilaration of what now might be,
– the impotence and rage of failed ideals and the power of new aspirations,
– the horrors inflicted on so many innocents that call us to greater compassion.
The challenge is to refuse to categorize ourselves. We don’t have to take sides or define ourselves as either optimists or pessimists. Much better to dwell in uncertainty, hold the paradoxes, live into the complexities and contradictions without needing them to resolve.
This is what uncertainty feels like and it’s a very healthy place to dwell.
~ From Perseverance by Margaret Wheatley
James O’Dea’s Peacemaker’s Booklist
This is a list of books recommended by James O’Dea in preparation for the May 2011 Peacemakers retreat. Check out James’ website for lots of good resources.
The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin
The Age of Empathy by Franz de Waal
Leading through Conflict by Mark Gerzon
When Blood and Bones Cry Out by J.P. Lederach
Consciousness and Healing by Schlitz, Amorok and Micozzi
A Common Humanity by Raimond Gaita
The Heart’s Code by Paul Pearsall
The Great Turning by David Korten
One World Democracy by Tetalman and Belitsos
On Second Thought (heuristics) by Wray Herbert
A Human Being Died That Night (S. Africa) by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
As We Forgive (Rwanda) by Catherine Claire Larson
Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester Brown
The Hidden Connections by Frijof Capra
Multi Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace by Louise Diamond/ John McDonald
The Survival Game (game theory and cooperation) by David Barash
Also, works by and contributed to by him…
Creative Stress: A path for evolving souls living though personal and planetary upheaval by James O’Dea
Audio version read by James available at www.jamesodea.com
Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement by Jossey-Bass
(essay by James: “Creative Atonement in a Time of Peril”)
Gifts from Aikido Training
I spent this past weekend at an aikido seminar and I know that I learned something; I just wish that I knew clearly enough what I learned to be able to put it into words. It is easy for me to be silenced by the experience of not knowing, expecting myself to have things figured out before I put words around them. This is a part of my old pattern of thinking that I hope this blog can help me release as no longer serving me or the world.
The old paradigm that I’ve lived by says to get things figured out before sharing them; that way I can appear wise. It is rooted in the old belief that wisdom is a function of knowing and that anything less than wisdom is foolishness and cause for embarrassment. I am ready to once again declare that I am a learner – not a knower, especially in the domain of aikido. One of my practices as a learner needs to be to learn to express my wonder and amazement and my half-baked understanding. In doing so, I may be able to strengthen my connections with the knowledge and to make it my own.
Practicing with a master like Ikeda Sensei is an amazing experience. As he describes it, he is able to take the big skills of aikido and make them smaller and smaller and smaller until they are no longer visible, until his aikido becomes an internal practice, not a big external physical movement. It really challenged my beliefs and my understanding of what is physically possible to watch him move three big men with only his fingertip and without effort and without apparent movement. My mind kept trying to figure out a physical or mechanical explanation for how he could make heavy bodies light and how he could drop a person to the floor with hardly a touch.
One of the biggest gifts of this seminar was the realization that so much more is possible than what I can understand and that my beliefs are a significant limiting factor for what I am able to do. Having experienced the potential for
- My beliefs about what is possible are too small and they are limiting me. By unconsciously denying what I don’t understand and what falls outside of my experience, I create an enemy of learning. Conversely, by opening myself to possibilities that beyond my current ability, I open myself to the potential for learning.
- There is an energetic dimension to aikido. Even though I am still focused primarily on the physical and mechanical techniques, these techniques are really gross manifestations of subtle shifts and projections of energy. The practice can make external physical movements smaller and more subtle until they become more energetic than physical. My rational brain does not yet know how to make sense of this but I do have an experiential glimpse of this possibility.
- “You cannot control another person, you can only learn to control yourself.” From this perspective, aikido is all about learning to maintain and regain balance in every interaction. The ability to sense the loss of balance and to regain it, thereby shifting the balance of one’s partner is the essence of every technique. Every training experience (and life experience) is another opportunity to practice controlling one’s self and noticing how the consequences.
- Technique begins with connection. Connection does not necessarily mean strength. It means intention and focus and it is as much energetic as it is physical. Connection involves the ability to sense one’s own and one’s partner’s center and then to be able to move them. Being a good uke (training partner) means being honest. Going through the motions of taking a fall in response to an ineffective technique is not honest and is not helpful. Neither is being resistant and not giving up my balance in response to an effective technique.
- Strength, rigidity and fighting are all responses that interfere with the ability to connect. Balance is dynamic. It is a flow, a continual returning. Because balance is a process and not a lasting state, the key is to be able to regain balance quickly and effortlessly. Balance is a process of letting go and acceptance, not of struggle or grasping. Living aikido means being willing to give up my position and my balance when necessary and to flow into a new balance. Such responsiveness is much more adaptive and resilient than fighting to retain or regain balance once it is lost.
- All of life is aikido. Everything that I have learned or glimpsed in aikido has direct application in every aspect of life. It is all too easy to get discouraged when I recognize my physical challenges and limitations. I’m sad that I will never have the physical flexibility and grace of the some of a young practitioner. This is a reality that I need to accept while not allowing it to get in the way of learning and applying everything that I can. As my sensei says, the practice of aikido is about learning to recognize what is getting in our way. For me, this means coming to peace with my abilities and limitations and allowing aikido to be a lifelong practice of finding balance and connection and learning to flow with the energies of life.