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Alan Watts on trust and control

April 6, 2006 By Being, Practice 8 Comments

I am thoroughly enjoying the podcasts of Alan Watts’ talks at the archive of alanwatts.com. Today, on the bus into Vancouver I listened to part four of “Seeing Through the Net” in which Watts talks about trust and control.

The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming.

In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including traditional Chinese society and, I would argue, many First Nations societies see humans as essentially good and capable and trustworthy. If you can view humans like this, then you can see a room full of people as a roome full of potential, and an organization of people is one essentially capable of doing good in the world. All you have to do is trust these inherent capacities.

This control issue crops up everywhere. If humans are essentially untrustworthy then we need laws to keep the peace and agendas to keep them on topic. We need rules, regulations, measurements, standards and assessment and evaluation criteria that judge the largely untrustworthy human against the perfect ideal, in order to see how badly they failed to achieve perfection.

The kicker for me in listening to Watts comes when he says that the problem with this logic is that if you believe that humans are inherently untrustworthy, then you cannot possibly trust your own thoughts about that. It takes you into a strange loop that is inescapable. On the other hand if you begin with the assumption that humans are good and can be trusted, you can trust that assumption and engage others in your work and adventures.

It seems to me that this is a critical part of the infrastructure that underlies how we choose to be together in organizations and communities. If we can trust each other, then we can trust that any sticky place we come too will be resolved by the people we are with. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t trust ourselves first of all, and the world becomes a sad place full of controls and statistics and punishment and devoid of the life and creativity and passion that we see in places where people are truly alive.

I try to work with people who believe in people and who trust them to find their way. It just sank in today a little deeper how profoundly this either/or really is. So here is a renewed call for a practice of deep and radical trust in the person sitting next to us. To the extent that we can trust them and validate their agency and potential contribution as a human being, we can do the same for ourselves. And vice versa.

[tags] alanwatts, trust, control[/tags]

Sayt K’uulm Goot

April 5, 2006 By Appreciative Inquiry, First Nations, Youth 3 Comments

It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia.

Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site.

The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and emerge engaged and powerful. They achieved this by simply turning to one another with a set of powerful questions about what might be in their communities and after some conversation, they delivered an inspired set of messages to policy makers and politicians.

In her report, Jane summaraizes the transformation of the day this way:

By the end of the inter-nation forum, it seemed that a shift had taken place – from the overwhelming sense of loss, alienation and fear people had felt in the face of youth suicide, to youth beginning to take the lead in finding a solution. THe energy and power of the youth were palpable, as was the willingness among the others present to hear and accepttheir views, the mutual respect and the support for the emergence of youth voices and youth leadership.

The inter-nation forum, the work that preceeded it and the subsequent results were the fruit of hard work by many people, but first among these were the youth themselves. It was such an honour to work with them. I hope the governments involved heed Jane’s report.

The powerful tug of invitation

April 4, 2006 By Invitation, Learning One Comment

Tunstall Bay, Bowen Island

An old quote, freshly rediscovered:

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work,
but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Dialogue to action

April 3, 2006 By Conversation, Leadership, Open Space, Philanthropy, Stories 3 Comments

Large group in the open space

Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it.

The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action.

But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen.

Back in the fall, my business partner Lyla Brown and I conducted a series of Aboriginal engagement meetings for the Victoria Urban Development Agreement process (the report is here). As part of the work, we held an Open Space Technology meeting with more than 100 community members to discuss and implement ideas that had been raised in a series of focus groups. One of the conversations at the Open Space gathering was on food security, and the results of that work have now borne fruit. Today, I received a press release in my inbox from one of the community agencies that took up the implementation challenge and ran with it:

Aboriginal Group Promotes Food Security as humble start in reducing Aboriginal poverty as Big Business

VICTORIA – Inner City Aboriginal Society (ICAS), by promoting an aboriginal community dialogue on food security, is actively working towards reducing poverty as big business.

As a reaction to the fact that an estimated 50% of the street-homeless community in Victoria are aboriginal – and that current funded strategies are focused on charity based or service provision approaches – ICAS has organized itself to encourage a move towards a third option. ICAS is facilitating a series of Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security at the end of March to provide information about food security issues, to explore cultural aspects of food security and to set some direction for further action. The discussions on food security represent – for those in the Inner City Aboriginal Society – the restoration of economic justice by transitioning the aboriginal community from victim to dignity status. Bruce Ferguson, one of the founding directors of ICAS expressed his opinion on the Aboriginal Sharing Groups on Food Security.

“Imagine if 50% of the budgets of all the downtown service providers and dedicated funds for the street community went to aboriginal people to empower ourselves….need I say more. Empowerment of the marginalized cant happen over night, but at least with taking back the dignity of feeding ourselves, we can one day reach equality with other Canadians…”

“The work of ICAS in food security dialogue will provide a challenge that moves the aboriginal community away from being objects of charity and-or clients of service providers towards strategies and languages that talk about empowerment and self-reliance” adds Rose Henry, long time aboriginal activist and recent candidate for City Council.

The Aboriginal Sharing Groups will be held between March 22nd and April 3rd.

Action is passion bounded by responsibility. Action becomes easier when there is a strategic architecture for acting. That architecture is forged in the fire of conversations about what matters, where people create relationships, connections and shared vision about what might be. When that action infrastructure is laid down, acting becomes fairly basic. When that architecture can be created from the bottom-up and then used by those who actually created it, then the action becomes both efficient and powerful.

The interesting thing about this series of community conversations on food security is that they have been taking place outside of the official program of the Victoria Agreement. The agreement itself is not yet signed, and there are many planning conversations going on behind the scenes to tranisition the structure of the inter-governmental relationships from working groups to action groups. While this has been happening, Inner City Aboriginal Society and its partners have been leveraging the strategic architecture that was formed in the community Open Space event to put this topic and approach in front of the community. They are seeking solutions to the problem that avoids a dependant relationship on governments and “charities” and in doing so, they are planning, organizing and meeting without government or charitable support.

Leadership, even in business, is about walking your talk and both creating and leveraging the strategic architecture to find a way to take responsibility for what one loves. ICAS is showing the way here.

BlackBerries and the cost of splitting attention

April 2, 2006 By Conversation, Facilitation 7 Comments

Merlin Mann points to a nice piece on the fragmentation of attention:

A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.

Recently I facilitated a meeting in which there were so many BlackBerries, I felt like making a pie. Some people had BlackBerries AND cell phones, and both were on.

What struck me was actually how the fragmentation of the room’s attention led to strange behaviour, like having BlackBerry users reminding me that time was tight and we needed to concentrate.

At one point, the most senior person in the group was caught off guard when one of his reports asked him a question that was very useful to the group learning about a good tool for fostering collaboration and communication. I turned to look at him, spoke his name and he looked up at me with a blank look on his face, like the kid in class that was caught reading a note when he should have been answering the math question. I asked him if he would share his experience and he paused and looked embarrassed and finally said “I’m sorry, I was on my BlackBerry.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at him and laughed and said “You are SOOO busted!” That cracked the group up, but the diversion cost the group a learning moment about the tool that never got fully dealt with. The group punished him by putting him in charge of a small piece of the implementation of the decision.

This is shockingly common, and it’s made significantly worse by having the most senior people in the meeting checking out. In the above story, the thought crossed my mind to say that someone could just email him the question and then could speak the answer when he emailed back, but that would have been even more rude.

The deeper worry with this kind of attention splitting is that it prevents a group from ever entering the kind of deep and reflective space that is required to do serious work. If a meeting starts getting complicated, and groany and difficult learning is taking place, good process requires that people stay with the thread and help contribute to an emergent solution. If you are able to check out when you are uncomfortable, or your attention turns to the more shiny task, it makes emergent dialogue nearly impossible. I would rather people exercised the law of two feet and took their presence physically elsewhere rather than leave the impression that they were available to the group conversation. It bugs me too, because I can see a tremendous upside to connectivity in meetings. Participants are able to retrieve information or catch outside experts in real time and bring fresh thinking to hard problems. But I don’t like have that kind of connectivity in the room because I’ve never seen it used responsibly.

It’s really a question of respect and embodied leadership:Be the communication and leadership model you want others to be. How do others deal with this?