The two most important women in my life
In my work with a new hospital north of Denver yesterday, one of the senior managers commented that one of the things that struck him most was the idea that people do not feel an authentic sense of accountability simply because we place on them demands that take away their freedom of choice. We feel this when people have faith in us.
Would you rather be accountable to a friend or a contract? Is it friendship or paper that binds two people’s integrity together?
My modus operandi in the world is working with friends. The vast majority of clients of mine quickly become friends and our working relationship almost always deepens beyond the “project outcomes” or “scope of work” laid out in our contracts. With many clients, including those with whom I work on large projects, there are no contracts whatsoever. Our working relationship is based on the trust that comes from the deep accounatbility of friends working together.
For sure there is a place for contracts and paper-based accountability in the world, but isn’t interesting note how much shorter those agreements get the closer the partners are? Isn’t it interesting to note the distaste most of us feel for “pre-nuptual agreements” which seem to reduce the commitment of marriage – a lifelong friendship – to a mere contract?
Contracts limit our freedom of choice, friendships open up freedom of choice. ANd the very best friendships, like the one I celebrated tonight, result in something emergent, something surprising and unexpected and new. It is out of those relationships that my best work comes.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Photo by Nathan Ward
Little elements that showed up lately:
- A beautiful periodic table of the elements by printmakers
- A reason why I love the web: Indian cooking on YouTube
- Johnnie brings it on with a great find on power. Bonus is that he also introduces me to Greater Good magazine.
- Dustin Rivers on unschooling as decolonizing liberation. Dude rocks my world.
- Jack Martin Leith, a fellow Open Space traveller, has been providing interesting resources on collective genius and innovation for years. This is his recent offering, an engaging power point presentation on world views and pathways to collective innovation.
- I’ve pointed to her before, but here again is Kavana Tree Bressen’s facilitation resources. Tree is a long time member of intentional communities and so these resources have especially useful application there. But I love her deep practice of consensus.
- “We come up the hard way, and blues is the way you feel…”
- The Mindmapping Software weblog
- Niyaz: new music for the 21st century.
- MungBeing magazine: worth a look and a listen.
I work with lots of colleagues and in general the flow of money is pretty straightforward. With some fiends though, we often sit with each other and think about what else we could do with the economy. Being clear about money is a life practice – in North American culture money holds all kinds of traps for energy between people.
My friend Tenneson Woolf has just blogged on this and he and his colleagues from a recent workshop worked these principles:
- Whereas the old model for these decisions is more transactional, the new model is energetic. It is not about who did what work. It is about how we collectively invite, create, hold a field to work in before, during, and after the event.
- As with design, work on logistics with open heart, enaged conversation, and clarity of action — beautiful.
- Agree to this as a conversation each time, not a formula, to listen with attention and act with love.
And in a coincidental post, Jack Ricchiuto offers this wisdom:
Interesting chat yesterday with my friend Jean Russell of nurturegirl.net and the new blog, thriveability.net. She suggests that thriving communities practice a sense of “currency” that embraces both economic and social capital. Currency is anything that “flows.” A community’s flow experience then can include all forms of purchase, barter, and gifts.
What’s interesting is that anonymous monetary currency doesn’t build community. It only, as Jean suggests, “outsources connections.” When I trade my time helping someone start a wiki website for their business for their time doing plumbing or editing for me, a relationship builds. When I hand someone ten dollars for an item at Target or Whole Foods, no relationship builds in that transaction. In a monetary currency economy, flow occurs without the building of relationship. In a gift and barter economy, relationship is formed.
[tags]tenneson woolf, jack ricchiuto, money[/tags]
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel:
“When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.”
And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him:
Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit of the whale. Keesta had thrown the harpoon, and the whale had accepted it, had grabbed and held onto the harpoon according to the agreement they had made through prayers and petitions. Harmony prevailed, whaler and whale were one, heshook-ish tsawalk.
All of a sudden something went wrong, some disharmony arose, some disunity intruded, and the whale turned and began to tow Keesta and his paddlers straight off shore. Keesta took inventory. Everyone in the whaling canoe remained true to the protocols – cleansed, purified, and in harmony. Prayer songs intensified. Still, the great whale refused to turn toward the beach, heading straight off shore. Keesta and the paddlers had kept true to their agreements, and now there seemed nothing left to do except to cut the atlu, the rope attached to the whale.
Keesta took his knife, and as he moved to cut the rope, Ah-up-wha-eek (Wren) landed on the whale and spoke to Keesta: “Tell the whale to go back to where it was harpooned.” Keesta spoke to the whale, and immediately the great whale turned accourding to the word of Wren, the little brown bird, and returned to where it was first harpooned, and there it died.
After the whale had been towed ashore, Keesta discovered, as he had suspected, that the disharmony and disunity had intruded at home. When his wife had heard that the whale had taken the harpoon, she had roused herself and prematurely broken away from her ritual in order to make welcome preparations. At the point when she began to go about her life in disharmony from the rest was exactly when the great whale had begun to tow Keesta and his paddlers off shore.
One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done.
At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field. On that one we have been working with a core organizing team to co-create the process and a workbook for the conference to use. Today on our last conference call before the meeting, the organizers asked about catastrophic plan in case something happened to me and I couldn’t make it on the day. I replied that in that unlikely event, we should reflect on the fact that we have planned this entire gathering collaboratively and that if I got hit by a truck next week, any one of them could hold space on the day, working with the group through the set of exercises and experiences we have planned together. Everyone immediately recognized the power of a core team and the power of co-creation. It reuslts in co-ownership.
Working with core teams is differnt from facilitating a planning committee. When I work with core teams I join them as a host to discover the heart of a project, and to develop a co-created capacity to host a project together. This is not the same as acting as a facilitator for a team, inmy experience. Core team work comes from the inside of the group, not the outside. This is especially true of the large scale change work, because those projects need more than one person to generate and hold the deepest need, and to create capacity that lasts, that holding must be within the project. The core team then becomes the host for the project and the project become the host for change in the world, or the organization or the community. These fractal levels of work are very interesting to me at the moment, and very important to learn about as well. We’ll be rolling a lot of this thinking into the module Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and I are leading at the Shambhala Institute this coming summer.