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Category Archives "Leadership"

How the old patterns die

April 29, 2014 By Chris Corrigan Being, Leadership 3 Comments

I can always rely on John O’Donohue:

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells

via The Question Holds The Lantern | John O’Donohue.

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A Better Way to Say Sorry

April 18, 2014 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Community, Leadership

It’s simple:

 

I’m sorry for”

This is wrong because”

In the future, I will”

Will you forgive me?

But it’s so important.  When you are engaged in work with teams of people and you are doing things none of you have done before, there are going to be mistakes made and people are going to be offended.  Learning how to apologize is important for a couple of reasons.

A sincere apology builds trust and strengthens a group. There is nothing better than a group of people in which people take on responsibility for their actions.  True leadership arises when folks step up, show their self-awareness and understand how their actions have impacted the group.  You build tons of social capital within a group by acting this way and it makes you resilient and more grace filled and more forgiving.

Secondly, a sincere personal apology is an incredible liberation for both you and the person you have offended.  If you have even an iota of moral clarity, something in you will be triggered when you have offended another person.  You KNOW you were wrong.  Stepping up is a cleansing feeling.  And to have an apology like that accepted and to be forgiven is beautiful.

This is fierce practice.  It requires us to be vulnerable and honest and to be carefully self-aware.  And done sincerely it builds capacity, grace and humility.

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An intro to the Art of Hosting and some mapping

April 8, 2014 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Community, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Leadership

 

Back in November Janaia Donaldson from Peak Moment TV interviewed Dave Pollard and I about the Art of Hosting, especially as it applies to transition towns, resilience and community leadership.  That video was released today along with a lovely 10 minute edit in which Dave maps out some of the essential Art of Hosting elements using the GroupWorks Pattern Language card deck.  Enjoy.

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Cultivating Communities of Practice

March 31, 2014 By Chris Corrigan CoHo, Collaboration, Community, Leadership, Learning, Organization One Comment

Etienne Wenger provides a useful set of principles for cultivating communities of practice as living, breathing things:

  1. Design for evolution.
  2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
  3. Invite different levels of participation.
  4. Develop both public and private community spaces.
  5. Focus on value.
  6. Combine familiarity and excitement.
  7. Create a rhythm for the community.

Read more at the link below.

via Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge – Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice – HBS Working Knowledge.

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Creating a mindset to work with failure

March 11, 2014 By Chris Corrigan Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Community, Design, Facilitation, First Nations, Improv, Leadership, Learning 2 Comments

Innovation does not come without discarding ideas, trying and failing.  In complex systems with complex challenges, failure is inevitable and desired.  If we need to prototype to sense our way forward we have to have a mindset that can handle failure.

On Saturday at the Art of Participatory Leadership in Petaluma my new friend Shawn Berry convened a session on failure and through listening to stories ranging from small prototoyping failures to business breakdowns and even deaths, I noted a few patterns that are helpful for groups and people to address failure positively nd resourcefully

Frame it up. In North America and Europe we have a cultural aversion to failure.  Failure is equated with inadequacy.  Our self-esteem is tied to our success.  Our compensation and status is affected by failure.  Fear of failure is prevalent in the culture.  In order to combat this tendency, it is helpful to work with a group to get them acquainted to failing.  For more playful groups improv exercises can be an excellent way to drop inhibitions to try something and fail.  More rational groups might benefit from a little appreciative inquiry where participants recall positive failing experiences.  Reflecting and sharing on times of failure and survival reminds us that it is part of the process.

Support the experience. While groups are experimenting and learning, succeeding and failing it helps to have support and coaching present in the process.  Depending on the kind of work being done you can offer support to keep a group resilient and unattached.  I have used several different kinds of processes here including the following:

  • Simply pausing for reflection periodically in the process to notice what is going on.  Slowing the process down helps to gain valuable perspective on what is happening and helps a group move on quickly from failure.
  • allowing failure to occur and then taking the subsequent stressful thoughts to an inquiry process using The Work of Byron Katie.  We do this often when working with groups in the non-profit sector for example, where the pressure to succeed is accompanied by feelings of fear of the results of failing.
  • In indigenous and other colonized cultural settings I have often had Elders and healers present who can care for the more invisible dynamics in the field, especially when our work is going to carry us into some of the sources of trauma.  When you are working in a place where people are operating out of deep historical trauma, the fear of failure can be laden with many many deep seated implications.  Having people in the process who understand these dynamics is essential.
  • Peer-coaching is a common way to build resilience in groups where trying and failing is important.  When a team is trying to learn something new it helps to also build the capacity for them to be able to rely on each other.  This is why so many teams value “cross-training.”  When athletes train, they often work out in ways that are not related to their sport _ a skier training by rowing for example.  Doing this helps them to learn to use their body differently and builds strength that supports their core work.  Similarly, work teams can learn a lot about themselves by creating situations of safe failure such as through improvisational exercises, outdoor experiences, games and other non-work focuses.  The skills learned there can help support the team when they knuckle down to focus on key tasks and can support constructive failure within the work domain.  Ultimately these skills will build capacity if they increase the ability of the group to support itself through stressful times.
  • Developing a practice of greeting failure with joy.  My friend Khelsilem Rivers taught me this one.  He is – among other things – an indigenous language teacher and using the tool kit “Where Are Your Keys” Khelsilem helps people become fluent in their indigenous languages.  One of the barriers to rapid fluency is a fear of “not doing it right.”  Khelsilem completely transforms the experience of failure by introducing the technique called “How Fascinating!” When a person (including the facilitator) makes a mistake, the whole group celebrates by throwing their hands in the air, leaning back and declaring “How Fascinating!”  While it might seem contrived at first, the technique opens up the body, and greets the failure with a collective celebration.  Blame and judgement is avoided, collective support is activated and learning is grounded.

Practices like these are essential to build into the architecture of processes where failure is inevitable if innovation is to occur.

Process the grief. When catastrophic failure occurs it can leave people grieving, frightened and cynical.  If there is no way to process the grief then individuals often build their next prototype out of fear.  If you feel you have been burned before, you might develop your next idea by building in protection against failing again.  While that can seem prudent and safe, in reality, building structures out of fear is a much riskier proposition than building structures out of possibility.  Without processing grief, a group or a person can be susceptible to being “defended.”  I learned much about this state from Dr. Gordon Neufeld who is a child psychologist who has described this phenomenon in children.  Taking a group or a person through the grief cycle using empathy, story telling and compassion can help free the emotions that are triggered in future learning experiences.

Building a mindset to embrace failure and support the transformation of the energy of failure is critical to groups developing the capacity to lead in complexity.

I’ve also written about failure here:

  • Mutations and system change
  • Dealing with the architecture of fear
  • Power, belonging and failure
  • Moving from failsafe to safefail

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