Alex has a great post today on his Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work. I’ve been hearing lately from many clients about the need for us to loosen up and accept more failure in our work. The pressure that comes from perfection and maintaining a failsafe environment is a killer, and while we all demand high levels of accountability and performance, working in a climate where we can fail-safe provides more opportunity to find creative ways forward that are hitherto unknown. So to compliment Alex’s post, here are a few ways to create a safe-fail environment:
1. Be in a learning journey with others. While you are working with people, see your work as a learning journey and share questions and inquiries with your team.
2. Take time to reflect on successes and failures together. We are having a lovely conversation on the OSLIST, the Open Space facilitator’s listserv about failures right now and it’s refreshing to hear stories about where things went sideways. What we learn from those experiences is deep, both about ourselves and our work.
3. Be helpful. When a colleague takes a risk and fail, be prepared to setp up to help them sort it out. My best boss ever gave us three rules to operate under: be loyal to your team, make mistakes and make sure he was the first to know when you made one. There was almost nothing we could do that he couldn’t take care of, and we always had him at our backs, as long as he was the first to hear about it. Providing that support to team members is fantastic.
4. Apologize together. Show a united front, and help make amends when things go wrong. This is a take on one of the improv principles of making your partner look good. It is also about taking responsibility and having many minds and hearts to put to work to correct what needs correcting. This one matters when your mistake costs lives. Would be nice to see this more in the corporate world.
5. Build on the offer. Another improv principle, this one invites us to see what we just went through as an offer to move on to the next thing.
6. Don’t be hard on yourself. You can’t get out of a pickle if you are berating yourself up for being there. I find The Work of Byron Katie to be very very helpful in helping become clear about what to do next and to loosen up on the story that just because I failed, therefore I am a failure.
Now these little lessons work in complex environments, like human organizations, not mechanical systems so before you jump on me for having unrealistic expectation for airplanes and oil rigs, just know that. Having said that, dealing with the human costs of airplane crashes and oil rig explosions requires clarity, and being wrapped in blame and self-loathing is not the same as being empathetic and clear.
A short poem from Edwin Markham, called “Outwitted”:
He drew a circle that shut me out –
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
Hat tip to my friend Janie Leask in Alaska, who posted this on her facebook wall.
Today, the new moon rises, a time of aupicious beginnings, especially coming so close to the winter solstice. These are important moments in Nuu-Cha-Nulth culture, and the times are important in Nuu-Chah-Nulth history. Last month, five Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes won a landmark court case that gave them the right to sell the fish that they catch. Not on an industrial scale mind you, but on a scale big enough to create small local commercially viable fisheries for communities that desperately need both the work and the reconnection to the sea. Moreover, the courta case declared this as an Aboriginal right, a significant ruling for coastal First Nations in general but for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth in particular.
All of this leads to a time when participatory leadership is needed to seize the opportunity of building culture and community back and doing real, powerful and grounded marine use planning. So today was a good day to get to work.
We begun with 20 minutes of Warrior of the Heart practice, introducing the concept of irime, entering in, joining energies with an attacker and helping them lead a situation to peace. This check in this morning was a powerful reminder to some about the way their work as hosts needs to change, to be able to stand in the fire of aggressive energy and work with it. Fisheries and marine use planning is full of passion and the work these folks will be doing will not be easy. But the passion that drives the aggressive fight for rights and allocations can be used also to build and heal community, and if we enter into that space well, grounded and ready and knowing a little bit, we can do something with that energy.
So today we heard a little about the court case and then we spent some time learning about the seven helpers with this harvest as a result:
From this morning’s sessionshort piece on designing meetings: Four groups of questions to ask before conducting any meeting, to help you choose a good way to get what you need:
BE PRESENT* How will we bring people together in a way that invites them to be present? * How do we make people comfortable to share from their heart and listen together for wisdom and learning?
KNOW YOUR HARVEST * What do we want to take away from this meeting? In what form? (notes? graphics? photos? video? audio?) * How will we use what we gather from the meeting?
HAVE A GOOD QUESTION * What question(s) could we ask that would invite contributions from everyone?
LISTENING PIECE * What is a listening tool that helps us have enough time for people to make their contributions and hear each other? * What kinds of activities and exercises can we use for people to explore content together and provide their own thoughts on our question?
If you use this checklist as a way of organizing your thoughts before a meeting, it will help you to stay focused and to ensure that everything you do is tied to the purpose of the meeting.
Nice…a basic set of planning guidelines for any conversation that keeps us focused on the harvest, and keeps us conscious about process.
After lunch we took the advice of our Elder Levi and the participants went out on the land to think about their work going into the community. This was the time to do a little oosumich, connecting with themselves and presencing the future that starts next week when they return to their communities. When they returned, we went into a really beautiful World Cafe around two questions that Laura and Norinne cracked. The first question was an appreciative question about a time when community was truly engaged. The second question, which we did two rounds on, was on question we could ask to bring community together around marine use planning.
The harvest from this was great, a real set of tools and ideas for them to use when they go home to start the conversation.
And sweet practice this evening. Bruce Lucas put on a potlatch DVD and some of us played Scrabble while Nuu-chah-Nulth tunes echoed through our dining space. Two or three kids played while we feasted on chicken, salmon and some great vegetable dishes prepared by our local caterer. This groups is really gelling, and becoming fast friends. They are tooling up on facebook and Skype to stay together as they move into this work seperately.
Tonight I can hear some geese flying overhead, moving south on the warm winds that have come in. The rain has stopped and the surf still pounds, the ever present sound of sae and land meeting, creating one another out of their shared conversation.
Tsawalk indeed.
It’s 11:30 and I’m about ready to tuck into bed. Through my open window I can hear the roar of the surf rolling on the beaches a mile away. The surf report says that the swells are coming in at 9 feet but are going to rise to 17.5 feet by tomorrow. The roar is deafening, but it is a sound that has been heard on these beaches from time immemorial. The Nuu-Chah-Nulth, upon whose territory I am working, have lived here as long as the sound of the waves has been heard, and they’ll be here until those waves stop.
And that’s the reason for this Art of Hosting – to introduce participatory leadership to people who are working in Nuu-Cha-Nulth communities up and down the coast ostensibly on marine use planning. We are using the framework of a set of traditional values based in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth prime directive: heshook ish tsawalk or “everything is one.” This principle of interdependence acknowledges that everything has a common origin and that our work in the world is to live according to several principles – basics you might call them – to be in accord with this natural law. We have chosen three of these principles to explore these days: he-xwa (balance), isaak (respect) and aphey (kindness). Today’s activities explored balance and looked at:
- The principle of tsawalk and the methodology for knowing the interior life of the world, called oosumich.
- Connecting oosumich as a way of knowing, to participatory meeting design, using a new take on Ken Wilber’s qnuadrants and my model of sustainability in communities of practice.
- Visiting the carving shed of Joe Martin, a well known Tla-o-qui-aht carver who dropped some good teachings on us about making canoes. The one that stood out for me was “we know the tree this canoe came from” which is to say that in an structure you have to know the source. Joe will not make a canoe out of a tree he has not seen standing, because he needs to know how it grew, where it’s weak points might be, which side faced the sun, how it lived with other trees and slopes and rocks. Only once he has understood the tree in its context can he cut it down and make a canoe out of it. The lesson here, is knowing source is everything.
- Doing a little Warrior of the Heart practice to discover something about balance and what it means to move from ground.
- Appreciative inquiry to connect to ground work and purpose in stories of health and abundance in communities and marine environments. We did a good long deep dive interview process, surfaced some powerful values and then entered into a dream phase but asking “If our work was to make the difference we wanted it to, what would our communities look like?” People drew systems diagrams, connecting the human and natural environments, the state of health of people, communities, ecosystems and economies. By the end of the day we closed with a breathing exercise, full to the brim with the almost sacred nature of this work.
Tomorrow we will dive into meeting and process design based on the principles of isaak meaning respect. The waves will get stronger, the new moon is coming, and something is feeling like it wants to be unleashed,
As the inner climate villages unfold here and in Copenhagen, the Europeans have cracked a simple set of practices. An email from Toke Moeller in Copenhagen this weekend:
Toke, Ulrik, Lisa and I were part of a workshop at yourclimate.tv today on inner climate. A great experience! The young people were excellent facilitators. They asked us to brainstorm guidelines (Toke reframed this into practices) that could immediately help people to clear the inner climate. First we were asked to brainstorm onto the whiteboard table in silence, then to walk around in silence and make additions and then to talk about what we saw. Also in our group was Lisette, a healer from Holland connected to the MeshWork and Amanji, a Hindi nun who said she had been a monk for 20 years. We were of fundamental agreement, but still had a very rich and deep conversation. We were then asked to boil down what we’d discussed into three salient points.
3 practices that if practiced
by any person on the planet
will help to clear
your inner climate–
Our knowing: There’s enough if we share
Practice: SHARE IT
Our knowing: We all have a choice
Practice: CHOOSE ON BEHALF ON THE PLANET
Our knowing: We are nature
Practice: FIND YOUR NATURAL RHYTHM
&
BREATHE – MOVE – LAUGH – REST
The foundation for these we suggest is an ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
Simple practices that bring us to the presence needed to host the conversations and shifts that are needed in these days.