Yesterday I spent an hour sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River near Albertville, Minnesota. We were deep in a design day, and I’m feeling a little run down and tired. I needed to go and sit, and rest and fill my lungs with air and my mouth with silence.
One of the tried and true things I know about sitting in nature is that it takes about 20 minutes in stillness and quiet before the system you have entered has absorbed you. Humans are clumsy at being in the natural world and we stumble and make noise. All the little birds around us stop singing, the mammels stand stock still and everything waits for us to move away or become still.
After 20 minutes of sitting in the same spot, bird song starts to return, little animals start moving around, and my own inner chatter has quieted enough that I can experience being a part of something bigger. It’s always at those moment that the possibility to learn something, however small, becomes real.
It was really windy yesterday as I sat on a little staircase that leads down to the river. The cottonwoods were clacking their big branches in the wind and last years bullrushes and milkweed, dried stalks, whistled as the wind passed over them. Little birds were flitting about – juncos, chickadees and song sparrows. the little things were chattery and noisy.
And in front of me, the river was flowing fast and deep. And as huge as it is, with all that water going through it, it was silent. It slid by, a massive quiet anchor in the scene. Several times bald eagles took off from the trees across the water and soared in the wind, stillness in motion, also completely silent.
And it just struck me then about how the biggest things are so quiet, and how our attention is drawn to the small and the flittery and the chirpy. Something about coming home to a large omnipresence. Something about the way the land hosts, the way the river hosts the scene, hosts the valley, and in this case, hosts half a continent.
Silent, large, present and in quiet collusion with the flow of water and wind.
There were many leanings for me this week here in St. Paul, Minnesota. Foremost among these I think is a deep recommitment to the essential nature of the Art of Hosting: what we call the Four Fold Practice.
I admit that I haven’t always given this particular model the attention it deserves, so if you have been in an Art of Hosting learning event with me at some point and you are scratching your head about it, let me explain.
In brief the four fold practice is this:
- Be Present and cultivate a strong practice of hosting yourself.
- Participate in conversations with deep listening and contributing from the heart
- Host others with good process
- Co-create a way forward together
it is simple, and it is meant to be simple. But like any real practice, it opens up a life time of learning.
When the Art of Hosting was named it was out of a sense that a new world of participatory methodologies needed a new set of deep practices for facilitators if we were to use them well. The four fold practice (or as I have been thinking of it, the four folded practice) gives us a practice ground to improve our abilities to host powerful conversations and move to wise action. I have noticed in my own life that when I act in this work without having attention to all four folds of this practice, I fall short of the abilities I know I have to host well. This practice explains how hosting is a leadership style as well, one suited for the complex questions and complex situations that we deal with as humans.
So I invite a re-engagement in the four fold practice, for all of us who are in this work.
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.
Graphic from puramaryam.de
Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results). There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.
Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system. Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power. This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other. This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both. The approach is fundamentally Taoist!
Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework. A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move. I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move. Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining. Adam saw it differently. By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%. This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process, This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic. You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working. In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move. Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana. Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.
Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power. I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level. I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler. Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful. Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation. There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.
Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other. This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications. Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization. Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously). I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.
Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice. But importantly, it is practice. Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited. The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.
This fall I have been really lucky to study and work alongside Alissa Schwartz in New York and Wendy Morris in Minneapolis. Both of these women are actors and performance artists, and in my working with them I have become cracked wide open to the reality of leadership and ACTION as performance, best trained through understanding the relationship of the inner body to the outer, the presence of the individual in relation to the collective and relational field.
Since connecting with the Applied Improvisational Network and working with colleagues Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Geoff Brown, I have been learning more and more about the kind of play that goes on in leadership. And I have recently been touched by the work of David Diamond at Headlines Theatre in a number of ways. This inquiry has led me into a much more embodied practice.
So I’m now thinking about everything I know about leadership, and have concluded that the traditional distinction between leadership and management is less about doing vs. being and more about technique vs. improv. On the technical side, management is about deploying resources and structuring relations using tools and processes. But on the improvisational side, leadership is about making and accepting offers, responding to context resourcefully, exploring the ligature of relationship and supporting engagement.
Is there anything about leadership that cannot be taught with a little theatre training? Actor training is not about creating a character that is not you. It is rather about connecting with your deepest self, and your lived experience to be the authentic character that you need to be. Improv is about relaxing everything you thought you knew about what is going on and being open to new sources of resilience and resourcefulness.
So how is that for a provocative proposition? It is a big learning edge for me and will be for my clients as well, but I can’t think of a better way to learn about and discover our inherent leadership capacities and the edges of our own learning and development, especially in a world where certainty is at a premium, and power constrains action with pre-determined process at every turn.
Improvise, respond, concretize, perform.