I love working with engineers. They are curious and always looking for ways to make things better. They sometimes suffer a little from bringing a mechanistic problem solving mindset to complex living systems, but more often than not what they contribute to processes is a sense of adventurous experiment. This video shows why.
A few months ago at an Art of Hosting workshop in Springfield Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and I had a great conversation about failure. We were curious about how the mechanistic view of failure has worked its way into human consciousness in this culture. There are very few places in the world where people are free to try unbridled experiments, especially in organizational life. There is always a scarcity of time, talent, money and materials that forces a mindset of efficient execution. Failure is not an option.
And yet, failure of mechanical systems – an engine blowout in the example above – can be catastrophic for the machine but doesn’t have to be accompanied by the destruction of people. Humans fail in different ways – we most often get things wrong or end up doing things unexpectedly but as PEOPLE we don’t fail. In other words, it is not possible for YOU to fail. Your body might give out, your mind may fall apart, but YOU don’t fail. Living systems, even in death, continue to cycle.
This is the difference between me and a machine. The argument can be made that it all comes down to lines and circles. Machines exist on lines. They are built and then they enter the stream of time, becoming subject to entropy immediately. Mechanics try to keep them together so that the machine survives the longest possible time with the greatest effeiciency. But all machines come to an end eventually and fall apart.
Not so humans and forests and oceans. These exist in endless cycles of complete interrelationship. Even when the earth itself is consumed by the sun in another 5 billion years or so, all of the heavy atoms that have flowed through this planet will be repurposed and reused in the next incarnation of the solar system.
The failures of living systems then are simply the mechanism that drives evolution, the next order of learning, living, structure and life. As time winds down, another arrow winds up – the evolutionary spiral of learning and adaptation.
There is a great image in the above video of an engineer standing next to a bucket full of a million shards of an engine staring down into total destruction and a complete end to a prototype and at the same time moving forward one more step in the cycle of learning and evolution. That is what reframing failure is all about, being careful to learn from your mistakes and not to see the pieces in the bucket as any kind of useful analogue for a life of curious engagement.
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So happy that Tom has started using a posterous site to share his thoughts with the world. He’s been writing great stuff lately:
We are geniuses at impacting the world while preventing impact on ourselves. As we solve our lives into greater and greater separation from the built-in learning mechanisms of evolution, nature has to stretch further and further to heal itself, to get us to pay attention, to stop treating feedback as a problem and see it as an increasingly urgent invitation — indeed a demand — to change. Yet still we go further and further out on the limb, brilliantly resisting nature’s limits and messages.
Our separation from nature — or should I say, our separation from reality as it really is, in all its fullness that is so hard for us to grasp — has now reached global proportions. Reality’s feedback is now coming in the form of increasingly extreme weather, emptying oceans and aquifers, cancers arising from an environmental chemical soup so complex we can no longer track the causal links any more, new diseases that won’t respond to antibiotics and can span continents and seas in hours on jets, and small groups and networks with increasingly powerful destructive technologies at their disposal.
We are rapidly moving into a realm where problem-solving becomes obsolete, if not downright dangerous — especially at the global level, especially when we are trying to preserve our systems, our habits, our identities, our protections and privileges. Because these challenges are not primarily problems to be solved. They are realities to engage with, to come to terms with, to learn something from about who we are in the world, to be humbled by and creatively joined. Yes, joined. Because inside the realities of today are profound lessons about who we need to be next, individually and collectively — about the cultures, technologies, stories, and social systems we need to create and move into. We won’t learn those lessons if we see these realities as merely problems to resist or resolve — or worse, to make another war on. We need to see them as embodying the precise information we most desperately need to take in right now.
via Six Degrees of Separation from Reality – Tom-Atlee’s posterous .
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Beware a rant.
I was in a conversation today with a friend of mine who is a true visionary. He is an artist who works with metal, rocks and even entire landscapes. He is a project manager and has overseen some of the biggest developments on our island, and some of the biggest ones in the Lower Mainland. He cares deeply about our shared home and sees all kinds of potential for Bowen Island to become a true innovative leader in the world. he knows the municipal tools inside an out, and looks at our official community plan and sees a joke. As an artist he sees our island in three dimensions, he sees our social landscape in terms of centuries, he sees possibility oozing out of every patch pf land, and every land use decision and every corner of the landscape, possibility that includes food production and long term restoration of old growth habitat and community cultural creativity and the chance to make a good, but modest living here.
Yet he isn’t bitter – on the contrary he is full of possibility AND he has a pretty good idea of how to get there. He understands chaos and complexity and living systems and how to create change without succumbing to control. As I listened to him speak about the small but very very deep shifts it would take to make our island truly self-sufficient, it occurred to me that without my friends visionary thinking and novel way of seeing, we are doomed as a culture. And the problem is that the kinds of tools that are available to us to plan and govern our futures are not about vision, they are about seeing.
Think about it. Most municipal governments are reluctant to say “let’s set aside that 200 acres of land for 300 years so that there will be old growth forest there in the future.” It seems pollyanna-ish. It seems like the kind of thing that is a good intention, but how could you ever do it, and what about the pressing needs of our people now? Never mind that it is actually easy and possible and wise, it is simply easier to look at what is around you now and manage what you have.
What does it take for organizations, communities and societies to recognize that a worldview based on vision is the way to secure a future, whereas one based on seeing is simply the one that got us to this mess in the first place. I note that the Liberal leader, positioning himself for an election victory, has chosen to make his campaign about restoring economic growth. With everything happening in the world right now, with the demand for leadership that takes us beyond the worldview that has mired us on the brink of economic and environmental catastrophe, Michael Ignatieff’s postion is that he will restore something that is bound to come around sooner or later in a cyclical capitalist society.
The reason he does this is because the mind set of measurable, observable short term results is king in this society. No one is going to get elected talking about stopping rampant economic growth and stopping the more is better mindset. Even if we are engaged in long term projects, someone always wants an indicator to know that we are on the right path. The management mindset has trapped us in the ever present short term. We are like a cigarette smoker dying of lung cancer who keeps having one last butt.
What does it take to do something with no expectation for gain, recognition or results? Just to do it because it restores more life to the future than we have now. A basic principle: leave more for the future than you took for the present. Could we be that mature? How much longer with this childish obsession with consumption and instant gratification go on?
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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Thank you Euan.
Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier than thou effect that this kind of stifling aloofness has on groups of people. And Euan names the price that it takes:
- Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on.
- Many, many meetings could be done in less than half the time if there wasn’t a need to feed the ego of the chairperson or more vocal participants. How many times have things gone on way too long because someone likes the sound of his own voice?
- How many millions and millions of pounds have been spent because someone was too pumped up and full of themselves to admit that perhaps the major project they are sponsoring should be aborted?
- How many fledgling social media projects get squashed by IT departments because “professionals” have had their nose put out of joint at “amateurs” thinking they know better?
- How many bright, committed and intelligent potential senior managers have failed to step up to the mark because they couldn’t face the antler clashing and ego massaging that goes on in the boardroom?
I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:
- How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
- How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?
That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes. A little empathy, a little creative tension, a little mutual compassion for the other helps makes designs for new and difficult things easier. These questions force us to really consider whether we are more capable than someone else. It forces a conscious awareness of the choice you are making when you adopt the pompous stance.
I choose to believe that people are capable of engaging in all kinds of things, from sitting in circles (the scariest thing in the world, if you would believe some) to radically letting go of huge projects they were working on because they weren’t going anywhere.
Lately I have been making an explcit request of clients that we create design teams for events and processes that DON’T include cynics. That is not to say that we don’t need people bringing concerns and challenging questions to the work, it’s just that when you have someone in a design team that does not believe in the possibility of what you are trying to create, so much energy gets taken up catering to the unhelpful pomposity of the rightous skeptic that the design suffers and in the worst case scenario, the result is a design that just serves the status quo. I have, in the last couple of years actually “fired” a client who wanted me to help create the illusion of a participatory event but who could not allow himself to actually let a participatory event unfold. He was completely unwilling to let go of control and unwilling to trust people. He even described the people he was working with, government employees in First Nations communities, as “children that need to be shown the answer.” There is a huge cost to this kind of stance in time, trust and the ability for groups to actually hold the real fears and concerns that they have. What do you think is possible when you work with someone who considers an important policy gathering to be like a daycare?
So start with possibility and create the space for inquiry, curiosity and yes even judgement to arise. But if you start with these things, you will not be able to create creative spaces of possibility because you will get mired down in the energetics of unhelpful politics, posing and pomposity. Staying in possibility is hard, but it is the only way we get to new places. More of the same is too deceptively simple.