Over the past few years, I have enjoyed watching Otto Scharmer’s practice develop as he moves between the world of high level systems thinking and grounded facilitation practice. The first book he helped write, Presence, was a lovely distillation of his reasearch and I have been working a lot with his new book, Theory U, with its grounding in practice, to work with networks and communities who are trying to access the source of their collective futures.
I have also appreciated his willingness to openly share the tools he and the presencing community have been developing at the Presencing Institute website. It means that we can play with and prototype the use of the tools in different contexts. One of the tools which I have used a lot is the Theory U journalling practice. At the past two Art of Hosting trainings (Bowen Island in September, and Springfield, IL earlier this week) we used that practice to reflect and ground the experience of the Art of Hosting and to set up a way of diving into what comes next, as a way of leaving the deep space of learning together and re-entering the world.
Here are Otto’s questions, taken from the latest version at the Presencing website. The last question is one I have been using as well. The instruction here is to go sort of quickly through these questions, not to get stuck, but to flow through the process. This can be done either as a solo exercise or in groups. If you are working in groups, you could move into a period of small group conversation about some of the learning. The whole things takes 25 minutes minimum, if you give people a minute or so for reflection and writing. I do it the way Otto does it, by reading the questions aloud to the group and having people reflect and write silently the first answers that come to them:
[ 1 ] Challenges: Look at yourself from outside as if you were another person: What are the 3 or 4 most important challenges or tasks that your life (work and non-work) currently presents?
[ 2 ] Self: Write down 3 or 4 important facts about yourself. What are the important accomplishments you have achieved or competencies you have developed in your life (examples: raising children; finishing your education; being a good listener)?
[ 3 ] Emerging Self: What 3 or 4 important aspirations, areas of interest, or undeveloped talents would you like to place more focus on in your future journey (examples: writing a novel or poems; starting a social movement; taking your current work to a new level)?
[ 4 ] Frustration: What about your current work and/or personal life frustrates you the most?
[ 5 ] Energy: What are your most vital sources of energy? What do you love?
[ 6 ] Inner resistance: What is holding you back? Describe 2 or 3 recent situations (in your work or personal life) where you noticed one of the following three voices kicking in, which then prevented you from exploring the situation you were in more deeply:Voice of Judgment: shutting down your open mind (downloading instead of inquiring)
Voice of Cynicism: shutting down your open heart (disconnecting instead of relating)
Voice of Fear: shutting down your open will (holding on to the past or the present instead of letting go)[ 7 ] The crack: Over the past couple of days and weeks, what new aspects of your Self have you noticed? What new questions and themes are occurring to you now?
[ 8 ] Your community: Who makes up your community, and what are their highest hopes in regard to your future journey? Choose three people with different perspectives on your life and explore their hopes for your future (examples: your family; your friends; a parentless child on the street with no access to food, shelter, safety, or education). What might you hope for if you were in their shoes and looking at your life through their eyes?[ 9 ] Helicopter: Watch yourself from above (as if in a helicopter). What are you doing? What are you trying to do in this stage of your professional and personal journey?
[ 10 ] Imagine you could fast-forward to the very last moments of your life, when it is time for you to pass on. Now look back on your life’s journey as a whole. What would you want to see at that moment? What footprint do you want to leave behind on the planet? What would you want to be remembered for by the people who live on after you?
[ 11 ] From that (future) place, look back at your current situation as if you were looking at a different person. Now try to help that other person from the viewpoint of your highest future Self. What advice would you give? Feel, and sense, what the advice is–and then write it down.
[ 12 ] Now return again to the present and crystallize what it is that you want to create: your vision and intention for the next 3-5 years. What vision and intention do you have for yourself and your work? What are some essential core elements of the future that you want to create in your personal, professional, and social life? Describe as concretely as possible the images and elements that occur to you.
[ 13 ] Letting-go: What would you have to let go of in order to bring your vision into reality? What is the old stuff that must die? What is the old skin (behaviors, thought processes, etc.) that you need to shed?
[ 14 ] Seeds: What in your current life or context provides the seeds for the future that you want to create? Where do you see your future beginning?
[ 15 ] Prototyping: Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the future in which you could discover “the new” by doing something, what would that prototype look like?
[ 16 ] People: Who can help you make your highest future possibilities a reality? Who might be your core helpers and partners?
[ 17 ] Action: If you were to take on the project of bringing your intention into reality, what practical first steps would you take over the next 3 to 4 days?
[ 18 ] Anchoring: What is one question you could take with you that would anchor this intention and keep you checking into it?
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Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans.
In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into an interesting conversation about fear. He said to me that he could never do what I do, walking into a circle and speaking to a large group of people. I expressed some surprise at this – after all I was talking to a trained soldier. I asked him if he had ever been in combat and experienced fear. He replied that he had been on a peacekeeping mission in Israel and that at one point in a threatening situtaion he had pointed a loaded gun at someone and awaited the order to fire, but he didn’t feel any fear at all.
We decided that it was first of all all about the stories you tell yourselves and second of all about training and practice. The fear of public speaking – fear that would paralyse even a soldier – is a fear that is borne from a history of equating public speaking with a performance. In school for example we are taught that public speaking is something to be judged rather than a skill to be learned. Imagine if we gave grades for tying a shoelace, or using a toilet or eating food. If we performed these important but mundane tasks with the expectation of reward or punishment, conditional on someone else’s judgement about them, having nothing to do with the final result, we might well develop fear and aversion to these things too.
The fact is that the fear of public speaking – glossophobia – is widespread and this makes me think it has something to do with public schooling. Our training leaves us in a place of competence or fear, and, as much of the training in social skills is undertaken implicitly in school (including deference to authority, conditional self-esteem and a proclivity to answers and judgement rather than question and curiosity) we absorb school’s teaching about these things without knowing where they came from. Certainly when I grew up – and I was a little younger than this soldier I was speaking with – speaking in school was generally either a gradable part of reporting on an assignment or was competitive, as in debating, a practice that was prevalent in my academic high school that sent many young people into competitive speaking careers as lawyers and business people. If you were no good at this form of speaking, the results of being judged on your attempts to get a point across were often humiliating. You lost, or you skulked away with the knowledge that people thought you sucked.
In contrast, my friend’s ability to find himself relatively fearless in an armed confrontation was a result of his military training, which, when it comes to combat, is all aimed having a soldier perform exactly as my friend had – calmly and coolly, especially in a peacekeeping role.
These days, in teaching people how to do facilitation, I am increasingly leaving the tools and techniques aside and instead building in practices of noticing and cultivating fearlessness. When you can walk into a circle fearlessly, you can effectively and magically open space. If you harbour fear about yourself or your abilities, it is hard to get the space open and enter into a trusting relationship with a group of people. Once you can do that, you can use any tool effectively, but the key capacity is not knowing the tool, it is knowing yourself.
How do you teach or learn fearlessness?
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I was thinking the other day about how to teach kids in school Web 2.0 skills, prompted by my friend Brad Ovenell-Carter’s blog post on figuring out how young is too young,
Now my kids, don’t go to school, but they work actively in non-technological settings with collaboration. They spend a lot of time together co-creating games, scenarios, worlds and activities. My daughter, at 11, is helping out in a friend’s store and she helped train other workers on the inventory system the other day before taking inventory with her new trainees. She has also been working with another friend to start up an Amnesty International group on our home island.
The discussion on Brad’s blog has been about critical skills in reading, learning how to read content that is user produced on the web. To me Web 2.0 is about co-creating, so responsible writing is a key piece of the work, so in thinking more about how to teach this I thought about what a Web 2.0 based exam room would look like.
What if we tested kids on collaboration instead of individual achievement? What if a class of 30 kids was given an exam one day but instead of every student getting a test paper there would only be six papers in the whole room. The class would need to divide into groups of five and complete the exam together. The Pass mark would be 95% and they would be allowed to talk to each other, steal ideas, look in books, phone a friend, whatever. Each team of five would be responsible for the overall quality of their own answers, so they would also have to make quality decisions. If there were several long form questions, essays and the like, they could divide the work up, or have a couple of kids draw up an outline and bring it to the group for polishing.
In most school settings, this would be called “cheating.” In the real world this is how it works.
It’s not just about critical reading or accurate writing…it’s about providing real opportunities to practice collaborating and noticing that when you work together, you get a better result than if you work on your own.
Anyone know any teachers out there that have tried something like this?
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The thing about working as a facilitator and helping groups become acquainted with their own brilliance is that you really want to be able to leave a group once it can take care of itself. For me, my consulting practice is as much about building capacity as it is about doing work. Viv captures this beautifully today:
So those of us working as facilitators are demonstrating how to tap into the wisdom of a group of people. How to hear what they are saying, build on each others’ ideas, and create solutions. The world needs a lot of creative solutions, I think. Not everyone has facilitation skills. Not everyone understands the difference between dialogue and debate, when to inquire and when to advocate. These skills will be necessary. Not as a profession – but as something we can all do. Maybe once we could, and we’re on a journey of rediscovery.
For my part, I’m going to continue to try and do myself out of a job. To let others in on ‘secret facilitators’ business’, build capacity where I can, use processes that are easy to learn and transferable, train others, share resources, help each other.
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The blog posts dried up because my evenings were taken in celebration, but here’s day four.
There is a deliberate pattern that unfolds over the week of the Shambhala Institute. Monday is a day of arrival and orientation to one’s personal intention and the building of a collective field of learning. Tuesday and Wednesday, we enter the learning journey that brings us all to challenge and to the very edges of the internal questions we are living with. Thursday and Friday are about celebration and re-entry into the world.
Thursday saw a plenary session that was startling for its content and its process. Adam Kahane, Meg Wheatley and Jim Gimmian presented a keynote plenary about strategy at the edge, and the edge they tried to cultivate was one where everything we believed in might not be true. We began in small groups discussing the question of what we believed at our deep core. A sample of these beliefs were harvested from the the audience and these beliefs were taken to be representative of the general sense of the community. Such values as inclusion and the power of relationships to transform systems and the beliefs around presence and intention were the sorts of things that were harvested.
When these beliefs were harvested, Meg then asked the question “What if these were all false?” There then began a kind of heady conversation on stage between these three rather large presences about hope and hopelessness and the clarity of living without beliefs at all. Adam invited the audience to pull their chairs around the stage in a tight mob, a claustrophobic crowd all facing the three. It was deliberately provocative and controversial and it seemed to have the effect of leaving people either shocked and confused nd in grief, or elated and detached. I was certainly in the latter group.
I was elated, because I guess I just am. My first reaction to Meg’s question was similar to my friend David Stevenson’s reaction: we were surprised that Meg had adopted the assumption that we believe these things are even true at all. We both know that they are simply beliefs. They could just as easily be true as not, and the question “What if these beliefs were false?” was simply pointing at another belief as well. It felt as if we were playing an odd shell game, shifting around emotional centre from one thing to another until people were finally felt either manipulated or above it all. There was a huge mix of reactions to the plenary along a wide spectrum of emotions.
I think the point of the exercise was to help us find freedom from our beliefs and not be addicted to communities and situations that feed unhelpful views of the world. I’ve seen Byron Katie doing similar work and imagine her hosting that plenary, inviting people not only to question their beliefs but also introduce a practice for how we could continue to question them and in so doing find more and more clarity as we design strategies from the edge where our selves meet reality.
At any rate, I had a shimmering moment of clarity about my own sort of permanent state of optimism. It’s obvious that we cannot know the future, even though many of us are certain that some things will surely come to pass or never change. But in the context of doom versus hope it seems clear to me that optimism may actually be the only useful stance. If things are not doomed, but merely hard, then it would seem that optimism would be a useful place from which to work. But if things are truly doomed and we are all about to face imminent death, then we have a choice: optimism or pessimism will have an equally useless effect. So why not learn from those we have seen die beautifully among us, and choose an optimistic and peaceful death. Making peace with our death, indeed, is really the last act that we will ever get a chance to perform, and it may be that this is what our lives are all about.
It seems clear to me now that pessimism (including the “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist” stance) is simply a statement of fear that one is not yet friends with. And if one is not friends with fear, then one may actually not be resourceful enough to be of much use in a crisis, or in a moment of chaos and uncertainty.
In my own life I faced one such moment in in 1995 in a mountaineering accident. A group of us were traversing an avalanche slide on the slopes of Mount Seymour in North Vancouver when one of our party slipped and fell 300 feet off a cliff. In the moment that she disappeared, I found myself extraordinarily calm. Three of our party were rather more panicky and were unable to be of much help until we got them to safety, The two of us who remained calm were really living in a state of extreme optimism . The only thing to do was be peaceful and resourceful and get help as quickly as we could. It turned out that our friend survived and in fact the rescue effort was a text book example. I was struck during and afterwards that my adrenal state was actually calm. Of course there have been plenty of times when I have been frightened and useless, but in that deep crisis, my body somehow adopted calm presence as a response. I was fearless and unworried. My friend had gone over a cliff and six of us remained with an overwhelming need to find safety before we could do anything about her. But without that calm, we were in extreme danger.
It seems to me that a pessimistic stance is more about the individual’s fear of inadequacy. If you feel overwhelmed, you give up. But two people in exactly the same situation may react in totally different ways, meaning that there are no givens about any situation or any result.
I sometimes use a juggling metaphor to describe what I think of as my stance that “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.” When you juggle you are working with the reality of gravity. Gravity ensures that every ball that drops will hit the ground. That is reality. But juggling is not so much cheating gravity as it is entering a partnership with it – the reliability of balls dropping at constant rate is actually what makes juggling possible.
When I teach people to juggle they generally come in one of two attitudes. A pessimist might generally watch me juggle and say “I could never do that.” Even as they gradually learn to work with one ball and then two and then three, they will deny the possibility that they could ever juggle. Usually what they are speaking is their fear of inadequacy or embarrassment at failing. Perfectionists are often pessimists because the reality never lives up to their ideal. Pessimists often give up on themselves and me, and they never learn the deceptively simple act of juggling three balls.
Optimists on the other hand approach the situation with curiosity and are usually interested in the aesthetic experience of juggling as well. Optimists learn fast because they recognize immediately that the balls always drop, so there is no problem, and their challenge is to gain more and more mastery, producing more and more beauty and living into more and more amazement at what they can do. Once they learn one trick, they hunger for more, they take satisfaction in what they can do and seek to improve and do it better. They are fearless about their learning and this resourcefulness produces results that continue to surprise them. I have taught people with very little perceived natural ability to juggle within three minutes. I have also taught people who don’t believe in them selves as much, but who take so much longer because we have to break through the belief that dropping the ball is wrong.
The truth is that the balls always fall to to the ground. The beauty of juggling is simply the ongoing possibility that the balls might not drop.
When we partner with reality it doesn’t matter what beliefs we carry. They are all false. And so, taking the advice of my mentor and hero and partner Caitlin Frost who is a deep practitioner of Byron Katie’s work, we need only question the beliefs that cause us suffering and not worry about the ones that don’t. If we can think of a peaceful reason for keeping a thought, we should do so. If not, work to shed the thought and make friends with reality. I can see this work now as terrifying optimism, a fierce sharpening of our own edges where we meet the world with resourcefulness, power and care.
This week I was reaffirmed in my belief that my work is to continue to be in the world living and working at every turn with the possibility that today the whole thing just might not fall apart.