Johnnie Moore posts a touching analysis of what drives bullying bosses in organizations. Some recent research concludes that a perceived sense of incompetence can cause people to lash out against others.
This has been my experience. Our culture demands answers, expertise and bold confidence in making decisions. Most people are trained starting in pre-school that these traits are in the domain of the individual and that your success depends on them.
What is missing is training in asking questions, seeking help and acting from clarity. In schools, these practices are forbidden in exam rooms, where students are evaluated on their progress. You are not allowed to ask questions, to ask for help, or borrow other’s ideas. All of that is considered “cheating.”
The stress that comes from needing to perform as a solo act can be huge and the resulting manifestation of this stress can be toxic. I have worked with and under both kinds of leaders and once worked with one leader who started collaborative and curious and evolved into a frightened bully. It seems to me that these individuals that suffered did so alone, with the thought that as a leader, they should somehow carry the load by themselves.
In a world in which nothing is certain, and answers are elusive, these expectations will always result in stress. I can find it in myself, when I step into new work, at a new level, how my anxiety rises. This is why, when I am doing something new, I almost always work with friends.
My take away from this piece is that relationship and work are equally important. To sacrifice relationship[ building for “outcomes” is to not only jeopardize the sustainability of good work, but to create a climate in which good work is unlikely to ever get done.
My business year usually follows the wet seasons, running for September to June. I’m finally back home on Bowen Island, relaxing and recovering, feeling rather burned out from a very heavy year of travel and work. Here are a few links that crossed my path recently:
- Euan Semple on why flashmobs are beautiful.
- Johnnie Moore on change myths and “best” practice.
- Holger Nauheimer has a series of posts on skills and change worldviews.
- Dave Pollard‘s unschooling manifesto.
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?
Photo by Nathan Ward
Little elements that showed up lately:
- A beautiful periodic table of the elements by printmakers
- A reason why I love the web: Indian cooking on YouTube
- Johnnie brings it on with a great find on power. Bonus is that he also introduces me to Greater Good magazine.
- Dustin Rivers on unschooling as decolonizing liberation. Dude rocks my world.
- Jack Martin Leith, a fellow Open Space traveller, has been providing interesting resources on collective genius and innovation for years. This is his recent offering, an engaging power point presentation on world views and pathways to collective innovation.
- I’ve pointed to her before, but here again is Kavana Tree Bressen’s facilitation resources. Tree is a long time member of intentional communities and so these resources have especially useful application there. But I love her deep practice of consensus.
- “We come up the hard way, and blues is the way you feel…”
- The Mindmapping Software weblog
- Niyaz: new music for the 21st century.
- MungBeing magazine: worth a look and a listen.
Seattle, Washington
Here at the Systems Thinking in Action conference doing a variety of things, including playing with my friends Teresa POsakony, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman, Gabriel Shirley, Nancy White, Amy Lenzo and Anne Stadler. We are together co-hosting a conversation space here at the conference which is a place for amplifying the questions and insights that re flowing from the plenary and breakout sessions.
This morning, Teresa, Tenneson, Gabriel and I practiced a new form of keynote harvesting. Debra Meyerson, author of “Tempered Radicals” was speaking on her work and we passed around a laptop and recorded a harvest, not of her speech but of our questions and thinking inspired by what she was saying. Here’s what we got…
Meyerson begins with a story of an all woman flight crew on the plane on the way up here. She asked if she could visit the cockpit at the end of flight…”Oh,” said the flight attendant. “We don’t call it a cockpit any more.” Things are changing.
Types of change
Types of change and approaches to change. Our own perspectives often blind us to seeing generative process. Two forms include:
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Episodic change, in which everything ticks along punctuated by discreet episodes of change. Tends to focus on programs and policies and formal authorities
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Adaptive approaches sees things as organic, always changing and adapting This emphasises dispersed leadership, and dispersed locations of change and shift.
Seeing things as episodic leads to NOT being able to see adaptive strategies and, by extension, the ram materials of sustainable change – peoples, actions, leadership, ideas and conversations.
Tempered radicals are balance beam walkers. They want to shake things up but stay within the system. They often come from the margins and experiences of differences which they want to to express while at the same time, they continue to fit in and cultivate their legitimacy. Tempered radicals are the agents of change within organization operating on a spectrum from changing informal structures all the way to formal, deliberate organizing.
It’s based on a belief and her research that small things can create change and momentum. Including radical acts like inviting different people to a meeting, sharing information to new people, wearing dressing outside the norm, and finding those small wins that change or invite a new conversations. It is quite organic and local at first then who knows what is possible as we discover the raw material for systemic change.
The role of tempered radicals
Meyerson is going in and talking about tactics that tempered radicals use in their workplaces. What I am looking for from her is the way that tempered radicals understand and attach to the roots of their work. My own experience is that people don’t just come from communities of difference or marginalization, but that they can find in any place a healthy and active place for the expression of the purpose that guides their lives. Tempered radicals bring a strong sense of rooted purpose to their work. How do you develop a rootedness that can thrive anywhere…tempered radicals as weeds. Weeds grow up in the strangest of places and cracks up the concrete and breaks up the soil. My experience of working with and being a tempered radical is that there is nothing really scripted about this work. It is not strategic in the sense of choosing specific tactics for specific moments. Rather it is a stand that radiates from a strong sense of purpose and rootedness.
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How do we develop and work with a strong purposive root that can help us act wisely within constrained organizations?
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How do we find each other in the world and support rootedness while the wind is blowing us around?
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I think almost everyone is a tempered radical. What is your core purpose and how do you bring it to work?
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What is the experience of negotiating your root, and what are the characteristics of letting your root go…what happens then. Is it sell out or leave or is there a third way to handle this?
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If you are a human being, a learning system, can you not be a tempered radical? Learning is what humans do, not what we learn. Children know this – do this. Like the “common as weeds” feeling here. BY the way, we don’t call them “weeds” (cockpits) any more, we call them flowers…
Systemic change based on small wins is not tactical – its about cultivating a practice. We need to create a massive diversity of small tries and harvest from the beginning so that we can understand what grows and what doesn’t, not as learning about the try itself, but more as learning about the system itself. Dye in a river…in order to understand flow. Planting the same seed in eight different places to understand the conditions for creating a 300 Douglas-fir.
One of the things we discover in doing this is what I am now calling “pattern questions” which are questions that invite a similar level of change at every level of the system, from the individual to the largest system. Discovering pattern questions help us to both find the channels of change and find the deeper purpose of the organization or the system.
Don’t let “winning” get in the way of change.
Amplifying wins means not working completely within the constraints of the organization but rather help the organization find its more radical purpose. For example you can help schools improve reading scores, or you can find a more rooted purpose around literacy and go there, and in so doing shift both programming and purpose, exploring the depths of your own pattern.
Working with psychological safety
Meyerson talks about the conditions for psychological safety, but she is really talking about external conditions and not internal conditions, skills or practices. Much psychological safety (or all of it?) is about the stories you believe about the situations you find yourself in.
Why is there such a need today for “psychological safety?” What in our pattern of learning has created the need for psych safety? When stuck, invitation to learn… When you are shot, you don’t have to die! (FBI agent story: what happens when you are shot is that you don’t have to die. FBI agents are trained to understand that taking a bullet does not mean you are dead. Understanding that in the moment can save your life.) The only time you are actually in any kind of danger is physically and all war begins with defence. So how can we bring REAL defence applications to the practice of peace in physical situations? And how can we reframe “safety” so that we understand what is really safe and dangerous and what is simply a belief about safety?
The barriers to change in organization are the foundations of “safety” in the school system: rigid roles, eliminating questioning, creating rewards for being “right” and “perfect,” and frequent and unpredictable changes, like a bell ringing every 40 minutes to tell you to go and do something else with no coherence. What creates safety in organizations are things that are not taught in schools: reducing perceived status barriers through eliciting input, demonstrating humility and accepting errors, creating, inquiring and working with expressions of deviance, celebrating instances of courageous behaviour (especially when that behaviour bucks the system.) Pity kids these days. They need a coming of age to bring them from their childhood worlds to their adult worlds, understanding that they are really moving to a mirror-image way of being.
[tags]stia2007[/tags]