I think it’s fair to say that the expression “I’m writing from a rooftop terrace in the old part of Istanbul” has a certain romantic appeal to it.
And this is where I am, having travelled on a short red eye flight from Copenhagen last night, to arrive with my family in a lovely hotel in the centre of Istanbul’s most ancient downtown, in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and with the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara in front of me. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and the family are all sleeping. We’ve started our two week holiday here together with a nap, a little breakfast and a cursory flip through some guidebook and wikipedia pages.
We’re on a one month European voyage. Our first leg was in Jutland in Denmark, spending six days with our dear friends Monica Nissen and Toke Moeller at their place in the lake district of central Jutland. On Friday Toke and I headed out to the west coast of Denmark, to a remote old hunting lodge near Tarm to work a little with key voices from The Natural Step International and the MSLS program in Karlskrona. It was good work and always fun jamming with Toke and good friends. Cool to see a countryside that reminds me so much of southern Ontario – rolling hills, woods and streams, farm fields and windmills. The whole landscape was changed by Danish farmers (and convict labour) starting at the end of the 19th century. It was previously heath lands and peat bogs, but in a remarkable national project following a war with Germany in the 1860s the whole countryside was repurposed for agrarian purposes and planted with beech and evergreen forest. Now it is mostly fields of corn and wheat and sugar beats and potatoes, with small patches of heath preserved where we gathered chanterelles and other forest delicacies.
Last night we left the open sandwich breakfasts and delightfully robust cheeses of Denmark for the sour yoghurt, strong coffee fresh fruit and olives of Turkey. We’re ensconced here in the big city for a few days and then heading to Capadoccia and the south coast for sightseeing, visiting sacred sites and chilling on the ocean. Our trip will end at a learning village event in Slovenia hosted by the Art of Hosting worldwide community. There may be a little harvest along the way, touch ins and reflections. But mostly I’m taking it easy, reading rather than writing, sitting rather than walking, sleeping rather than eating.
Feels good.
Good piece on knowing oneself…
I am more and more compelled by my friend Carol Sanford’s notion that those of us who strive to be “helpers” are most of service when we see ourselves as “re-sources,” agents of helping others re-connect and return to themselves more fully and deeply. Our tools for this are not “best practices” and expert advice, as Carol notes, but observation, inquiry and developmentally-oriented questions, and care-full listening. These are what help to create more space for discovery. Our gain is very much mutual.
Just read an article on how the fear of failure is the greatest thing holding back innovation in the business world. One reads these kinds of articles all the time. The essence is that unless we can let go of fear or deal with our deep need to be in control at all times, innovation is stifled.
This is true of course, but I see few articles that talk about how fear of failure in built into the architecture of the organization.
We live in an expert driven culture. Kids raised in schools are taught at an early age that having the answer is everything. Children raise their hands and are given points for the correct answer. Marks and scores are awarded for success – failure gets you remedial help, often crushing dreams and passions at the same time.
In the post-school world, most people are hired in a job interview based on the answers they give. There are millions of words written on how to give a stellar job interview, to land the job of your dreams. It is has to do with giving the right answers.
And so it is no surprise in the organizational world that I see success as the the only way forward and failure as “not an option.” For leaders, embracing failure is almost too risky. Despite the management literature to the contrary, I see very few leaders willing to take the risk that something may fail. Sometimes the failure is wrapped in competence – it’s okay to fail, but not to have losses. In other words, don’t do something I can’t repair.
This is because few of these articles talk about some of the real politiks of organizational life. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail – it’s that I am afraid to lose my job. When there is a scarcity of political capital and credit in an organization, there are multiple games that are played to turn failure into a way to screw the other guy so I don’t lose my job. Blame is deflected, responsibility is assigned elsewhere, and sometimes people will take credit for taking the risk but will lie the failure at the feet of someone else. It’s relatively easy to play on the expert driven culture to advance your own causes at the expense of another’s failings.
The answer to this is for leaders to be engaged in changing the architecture of fear and failure in the organization. It means hiring people into their areas of stretch, not into their areas of core competence. It means embodying risk taking, and creating and maintaining a culture of risk and trust. A single betrayal destroys the fabric of a risk taking team.
I think that means going beyond simply having corporate pep rallies to celebrate failure, or giving incentives for the “best failed idea.” It goes to creating a culture of conversation and collective ownership for successes and failures. It means standing with each other and not advancing your own interests at the expense of something that was tried. It means deeply investigating on an ongoing basis the ways in which we hold each other accountable so that we may work with grace and support, to rush in to help when things go sideways instead of lobbing accusations from the sidelines.
Without changing the architecture of fear, embracing the fear of failure is impossible.
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