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Love and power, holons and process

November 29, 2011 By Art of Hosting, BC, Community, Design, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, Practice, World Cafe 5 Comments

Graphic from puramaryam.de

Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results).  There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.

Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system.  Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power.  This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other.  This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both.  The approach is fundamentally Taoist!

Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework.  A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move.  I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move.  Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining.  Adam saw it differently.  By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%.  This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process,  This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic.  You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working.  In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move.  Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana.  Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.

Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of  holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power.  I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level.  I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler.  Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful.  Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation.  There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.

Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other.  This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications.  Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization.  Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously).  I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.

Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice.  But importantly, it is practice.  Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited.  The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.

Leadership is theatre

November 28, 2011 By Improv, Leadership, Learning, Practice 6 Comments

This fall I have been really lucky to study and work alongside Alissa Schwartz in New York and Wendy Morris in Minneapolis.  Both of these women are actors and performance artists, and in my working with them I have become cracked wide open to the reality of leadership and ACTION as performance, best trained through understanding the relationship of the inner body to the outer, the presence of the individual in relation to the collective and relational field.

Since connecting with the Applied Improvisational Network and working with colleagues Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Geoff Brown, I have been learning more and more about the kind of play that goes on in leadership.  And I have recently been touched by the work of David Diamond at Headlines Theatre in a number of ways.  This inquiry has led me into a much more embodied practice.

So I’m now thinking about everything I know about leadership, and have concluded that the traditional distinction between leadership and management is less about doing vs. being and more about technique vs. improv.  On the technical side, management is about deploying resources and structuring relations using tools and processes.  But on the improvisational side, leadership is about making and accepting offers, responding to context resourcefully, exploring the ligature of relationship and supporting engagement.

Is there anything about leadership that cannot be taught with a little theatre training?  Actor training is not about creating a character that is not you.  It is rather about connecting with your deepest self, and your lived experience to be the authentic character that you need to be.  Improv is about relaxing everything you thought you knew about what is going on and being open to new sources of resilience and resourcefulness.

So how is that for a provocative proposition?  It is a big learning edge for me and will be for my clients as well, but I can’t think of a better way to learn about and discover our inherent leadership capacities and the edges of our own learning and development, especially in a world where certainty is at a premium, and power constrains action with pre-determined process at every turn.

Improvise, respond, concretize, perform.

A small inkling of the new peace

November 26, 2011 By Collaboration, Emergence, Invitation, Leadership

My friend Tom Atlee has been a remarkable documented of the lessons from the #Occupy movement. Since I was at Wall Street two months ago I have continued to be astonished at the creativity, leadership and communication styles emerging from the movement.

Today though, Tom has a long post on perhaps the most astonishing event yet. Following the well publicized pepper spraying of students at UC Davis, a remarkable non-violent action took place to de-escalate the situation. Take the time to read the whole post and watch the full video. It is moving, inspiring and possible ground breaking in the way police and protestors can be invited to work together to keep peace. It is the essence of real time chaotic action.

Working with Cynefin to find questions

November 24, 2011 By Design, Stories 3 Comments

 

Working with a client tonight who is beginning a process of trying to find some questions for moving forward.  The client is a group of churches who are exploring how they might collaborate to undertake their joint mission together.  There are a number of factors at play, and the environment they are working in is diverse.

Tonight, with a few short hours, we’ll do a little story gathering.  We’ll begin by exploring an uncontextualized Cynefin framework and then invite small anecdote circles to form around the question of “What are the challenges and role of our Churches in this region, in this time?”  I’ll invite groups to explore this question using stories.  The idea is to gather anecdote fragments in each circle and then explore contextualizing a framework to give us a sense of the work that might lay before us, should people choose to work more collaboratively.  I am hoping that, despite a short time together, the exercise will open some inquires, especially in the complex space, that people might be interested in pursuing.

The perfect time to do planning

November 23, 2011 By Collaboration, Leadership, Organization

I have often had calls from clients in the past that begin “we are having a lot of communication problems in our organization. We think it is a good time to do some strategic planning.”. My common response to that is to point out that those two statements do not go together.

If you engage in strategic planning, especially if that planning is looking at working with organizational structures, and you haven’t dealt with communication, interpersonal and power issues then there is a strong likelihood of those unspoken dynamics being built into your organizational structure. Silos get created for many reasons, among them the fact that people sometimes don’t want to work with each other.

I had a meeting with a client yesterday, with whom I am working on Friday. His organization is in great shape. They have a rolling five year plan which has no targets in it, but only a series of strategic objectives. He creates targets on a yearly basis or as funding comes in. The board is in good shape and the organization is providing good service to its members. In our meeting yesterday we were able to think about setting aside a third of our planning time to have a blue sky conversation about the future of the organization, the changing environment and some new philosophical frontiers for the group. It feels easy, even though this is an organization that works in financial administration. We don’t have to consume energy fighting political battles and power dynamics, and we can instead look outwards.

People often deride the relational aspects of organization life as “soft”. They aren’t. They are the underlying architecture that makes core business lines possible and that ensures quality in every offering.