Menu

Compassion and mutuality

September 2, 2003 By Being

The other day Michael Herman and were talking about compassion and mutuality. The idea is that mutuality is making someone appear as real to you as you appear to yourself.

Naturally this means understanding that the person sitting across the room from you at this moment is full of an inner life that is as rich as yours. Confidence, self-esteem, confusion, love, pain, grief, celebration – all of these things are known to them too.

It sounds so trite on one hand, but it is incredibly powerful the more I dig into this thought. So often we see others as “punching bags” able to absorb hurt that we project without any internal effect. And yet, we know damn well how it feels to be cursed at (or smiled at for that matter).

To say that someone appears as real to you as you appear to yourself is to understand that when we think of ourselves we rarely think about our bodies. As Douglas and Catherine Harding would say, we don�t even know we have a head. We don�t see our back…we only see a small percentage of the body that other’s see. What makes us real to ourselves in our inner lives of thoughts emotions and sensations. With practice it is possible to sense that every other person in the world also has this inner life, despite that fact that we usually only perceive them as bodies.

* * *

In a related move, Euan Semple at The Obvious? points me to The Global Rich List, which tells me that in an average year I am about the 50,000,000th richest person in the world, which puts me in the top 0.836 percentile.

I have a lot of work to do to understand compassionate relations when 5,949,632,435 are poorer than me. Five billion is a number I can’t even conceive of, but it does put minor aches and pains in context.

106240199371432249

September 1, 2003 By Uncategorized

If you scroll back through this archive of architectural Eyesores of the Month you will find many of them are fronted by flags. The author, in his cynical wisdom, will say things like “Note the large American flag, planted in front of the mall to ward off criticism.”

Goring the sacred cow is a necessary evil if we are to bore down to the truth behind the things that are slowly crushing us. Not just the soul-stealing architecture of suburbia, by the equally draining toil of going to work in places like hospitals, where doctors and nurses are expected to put in shifts sometimes lasting 36 hours. Depriving a person of sleep for this long and placing life and death decisions in their hands would be outrageous except for the culture that has sprung up around medicine, the tough-as-nails, nothing’s-gonna-knock-me-down machismo that infects generation after generation of young interns. It’s impossible to criticize, because the work of saving lives demands this kind of commitment, or so the story goes. Allegorical flags wave over the whole situation. To take a bead on the absurdity of it all is to demonstrate terminal disloyalty.

If we want people to care about their work and their communities, we have to ask them what kind of work they really want to do. It’s no good insisting that they get passionate about what we want them to do. That requires all sorts of traps, like putting flags in front of big box stores, somehow channeling patriotic fervour into shopping at Wal-Mart. No, we have to step back and remove these inane devices and clearly ask two questions:

  • What do you really want to do? and
  • Why don’t you take care of it?

Passion will magically appear. Responsibility will suddenly blossom. Authenticity arises and everything works better.

With thanks to Harrison Owen, for the questions.

106235071577139708

August 31, 2003 By Uncategorized

One of the 2% of Bowen Islanders who blog just sent me an email with a really crisp late summer definition of blogging vs. traditional website maintenance:

BLOGs are like ferry conversations – just happens, a website is like a barbecue – gotta organize it.

Thanks to Markus Roemer at Stinky Cat.

106214073113949039

August 29, 2003 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

Fused glass button

From a collection of glass buttons, this one stood out. Buttons as fastners, connectors, things that draw two other things together and hold them there echoed in the plug and wire, the implied connection, the plugging into power.

Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a collection of still life sketches, tiny portraits of objects, food and rooms, which critic Norman Weinstein called “a mirror for our nonsense, a dictionary for our daily distraction�.”

Buttons as connectors, tender buttons as blogs.

106209368713871243

August 28, 2003 By Uncategorized

From an email from the Plexus Institute, comes this piece, an interview with Birute Regine and Roger Lewin on complexity in organizations:

Complexity theorists argue that managers should allow creativity and efficiency to emerge naturally within organizations rather than imposing their own solutions on their employees. They can do this by setting some basic ground rules and then encouraging interactions or relationships among their employees so that solutions emerge from the bottom up. Managers can’t predict what the solutions will be. But just as a flock of birds can achieve more than a bird flying solo, it’s likely that the energy and enthusiasm that are unleashed when employees are working together will yield successful results.

This is a fantastic article on the application of complexity theory to organization issues, and it jives really nicely with a practice of Open Space Technology. For example Regin says:

Take the property of emergence, for instance. In computer models based on complexity theory, when autonomous agents interact and mutually affect one another, patterns will emerge–an intrinsic order just waiting to unfold. But it comes about in a nonlinear way, so the order can’t be predicted. When we translate computer models into human terms, the autonomous agents are people and the interactions among them are relationships. Complexity theory underscores the importance of relationships. How people relate to one another affects what emerges in the organization–the culture, the creativity, the productivity.

So if you want a culture that is intrinsically creative, growing and learning, you have to look at the relational level: Can people be real with one another? Is there trust? Do people acknowledge each other and the good work they do? In organizations that have relationships as their bottom line, a culture of care and connection emerges–and it is palpable. In this context, people are more willing to change and are more adaptable because they feel they’re not alone and that together they can manage most anything.

The piece contains good advice on working with a relational, complexity-based model both for consultants (facilitate conversations and invite people to establish real connections with each other) and leaders (“give up the illusion of control and concentrate instead on setting a larger vision for their organizations so that the creativity of their people can emerge.”)

I’ll post the entire article at the Deeper Open Space wiki as well for more conversation, should you wish to join me there.