Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.
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.
From an interview with my dear friend Peggy Holman on enhancing creative leadership:
Q: What is one practice that people could start applying today to bring more creativity into their work or their business Ӭorganization?
Holman: If I were to pick on practice that is simple to apply and powerful in its affect, I’d say: welcome disturbance by asking questions of possibility. Creativity often shows up in a cloak of disruption. It makes sense when you stop and think about it. If there were no disruption, there’d be no reason for change. And change opens the door to creativity.
Great questions help us to find possibilities in any situation, no matter how challenging. Here are some of their characteristics:
- They open us to possibilities.
- They are bold yet focused.
- They are attractive: diverse people can find themselves in them.
- They appeal to our head and our heart.
- They serve the individual and the collective.
Some examples:
- What question, if answered, would make a difference in this situation?
- What can we do together that none of us could do alone?
- What could this team also be?
- What is most important in this moment?
- Given what has happened, what is possible now?
Some tips for asking possibility-oriented questions:
1. Ask questions that increase clarity: Positive images move us toward positive actions. Questions that help us to envision what we want help us to realize it.
2. Practice turning deficit into possibility: In most ordinary conversations, people focus on what they can’t do, what the problems are, what isn’t possible. Such conversations provide an endless source for practicing the art of the question. When someone says, “The problem is x,” ask, “What would it look like if it were working?” If someone says, “I can’t do that,” ask, “What would you like to do?”
3. Recruit others to practice with you: You can have more fun and help each other grow into the habit of asking possibility-oriented questions. But watch out: it can be contagious. You might attract a crowd.
Those last three practices are terrific.
A basic diagram for hosting questions that create extraordinary conversations. In the life of organizations and communities there are times when questions arise that just can’t be dealt with in the regular course of events. This is often when those of us who are consulting facilitators are brought into an organization. We are often told that “we have reached a place where we need a facilitator to help.” Usually there is an obvious need or purpose stated right in the first few sentences of the phone call or the email. This is something that consultants like us have to bear in mind.
The organizations we work with are in a constant flow of work. We were are hired to help facilitate something around a question that comes up, we have to remember that what we are doing is taking something out of the flow of work, turning it over and returning it to the stream. Unless we are involved in deep systemic change – where the banks of the river change as it were – our work is about diverting some time and attention from the mainstream.
To do this well, there are three basic phases to pay very close attention to. Each of these phases has to be designed in the beginning, but with space for emergent outcomes. Think of this model as a framework for holding the flow of an extraordinary event in the life of an organization. That could mean a one day think tank, a three day off-site or a two-hour staff meeting.
First there is the invitation phase. In this phase, we have to pay careful attention to inviting people well into our process. Among other things, participants have to know:
- What the clear purpose is
- How this will affect their work
- Why they should take time and attention away from their regular tasks
- What is required of them to participate well.
A skillful invitation invites people to suspend their day-to-day concerns to give their attention fully to the task at hand. For extraordinary meetings, especially those where the gathering is held in a different way than expected, it’s important to brief people before hand about how their roles might be different than they expected.
The second phase is hosting and harvesting. Of course this is the meat of any meeting, but I’m a strong advocate for focusing on the harvest primarily in the design and letting that determine the processes you will use to host. What is the purpose of the meeting? What impact is it intended to have? How will we capture and share the results and where will they go? From those questions choosing processes will be simpler. Choose processes that get you to that desired outcome.
A further consideration for hosting and harvesting is to balance the three domains of work, relationship and co-learning. I have written more about that elsewhere, but the essence is that balancing those three foci will give you an experience where work is at the forefront, learning together helps figure your way through the questions and building relationships ensures sustainable results.
The final stage is integration whereby we give some deep consideration to how the results of an extraordinary conversation can be re-integrated back into the organization. There are manyfactors to consider here, and some of them include:
- communicating results to those that weren’t there, especially the qualitative and non-visible results
- working with power and leadership
- dealing with resourcing issues
- balancing the need for new action with the reality of mundane tasks back in the main stream
- working with and supporting new ideas that might be at odds with the existing flow and structure
There are of course a myriad of issues with integrating new ideas and shifts in direction back into the life of an organization, but if there is one piece of advice I can give it is this: think about it before you have to do it. The worst case scenario for success is that an extraordinary conversation results in a stunning insight but that there is no way to reintegrate that back into the work of the organization.
Pay attention to these three stages up front, in the design process. Create questions around each of these stages and ask them of your planning team. Never be afraid to deviate from the “plan” but try to keep your thinking ahead of the game.
I’ve been thinking on similar lines; it’s quite tempting to write stuff about faciliation to guide the “leader”… but maybe it would be more powerful to write for the participants. Steve, in fact, goes ahead and does this, suggesting 12 Acts of Courage to Change Meetings for Good.
via Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Facilitation for participants.
Yes indeed Johnnie, and I see this as fundamental to the invitation process, so that participants know what they are getting into.