Author: Tenneson Woolf

Joseph Campbell, known often for his work on The Power of Myth, said, “Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.” Argh! I recognize this as true, even though often I really want to avoid looking at my stumbles.

Recently, I felt a stumble in my work with a prospective client, a first contact with them. To be honest, I don’t know if they have noticed or not, but I felt it in me.

I was talking to them about an initiative that they were creating. They invited me to the conversation. Their initiative included a couple of meetings with stakeholders that they wanted some help with. They wanted to create more engagement. More sharing of story. More sharing of questions. More turning to one another. This is work that I can do well. I immediately had ideas that would work quite well for them to accomplish what they were hoping.

But something didn’t feel right in the conversation. Something was a bit out of alignment for me in how I was talking to them. I couldn’t put my finger on it in the moment, but then realized a stumble and a treasure.

One layer of the work with them was simple facilitation. They were asking me if I could do that with them. And the answer to that is yes. I do that all of the time. I know many of the dynamics at play. I know how to cut through the tensions. I know how to shift the energy by the question asked. I have much experience with this.

However, another layer of the work was beyond facilitation. I believe, it was about creating more of a culture that remembers how to turn to one another, to be curious with one another, to have some processes for getting unstuck with one another. This layer of work is about changing a culture.

I don’t doubt that the “mere facilitation” would be very useful and lead to much good. But it’s the culture creating level that is far more interesting to me, and far more helpful to the client system. “Facilitation for us,” even with great participative processes, is an unintended pattern from an older paradigm of leadership that relies way to much on the seduction of expertise. “Culture creating with us” — now that’s changing minds and thinking patterns that feels like the much more needed experience. That’s what I really wanted to invite this client to see and to be in together. I wasn’t communicating that with them — thus the stumble.

“Culture creating” reminds me of the physicist David Bohm’s remark, “The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.” David Bohm, with all of his great merging of physics with dialogue (“meaning flowing through”) was pointing to this culture making.

What will happen with this client? It’s too soon to tell. But in the stumble, my own stumble on the path that is fierce commitment to the deepest purpose and most benevolent outcome, there is a treasure that changes how I will follow up with them and how we might work together that feels very honest and exciting.

Dr. Donald M. Berwick is a Senior Fellow at American Progress. He is also president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, or IHI, which Dr. Berwick co-founded and led as president and CEO for 18 years. He is one of the nation’s leading authorities on health care quality and improvement. Don was an appointee by President Barack Obama to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but faced significant opposition by the Republican Party. He’s a person that’s been involved in politics and healthcare as a big chunk of his life.

Don Berwick is also a person who addressed the graduating class of Yale Medical School in 2010. This passage below was sent to me by a friend that I’ve been in conversation with lately about mystery, healthcare, and promoting wellness.

“But, now I will tell you a secret – a mystery.  Those who suffer need you to be something more than a doctor; they need you to be a healer. And, to become a healer, you must do something even more difficult than putting your white coat on. You must take your white coat off. You must recover, embrace and treasure the memory of your shared, frail humanity – of the dignity in each and every soul. When you take off that white coat in the sacred presence of those for whom you will care – in the sacred presence of people just like you – when you take off that white coat, and, tower not over them, but join those you serve, you become a healer in a world of fear and fragmentation, an ‘aching’ world, as your chaplain put it this morning, that has never needed healing more.”

Mystery will always matter. Wow, that’s a strong statement that I just let write itself onto the page. Mystery. Impermanence. An orientation in all of us that releases the ridiculous hold of certainty that is over used, over played and idolized.

I’m grateful to my friend for highlighting this passage. And for people like Berwick who, though I haven’t met, calls forth a part of many of us that senses how powerful it is to be in that mystery together.

One simple comment that I heard in January from a friend continues to reprioritize how I am thinking about all of my event and meeting designs.

It was Phil Cass, former CEO of four related health organizations in Columbus, Ohio that shared, “Unless the inner changes, the inner state of the leader, there is not much that changes or sticks in the outer programs. The programs come and go, each with their value. But there is no getting around the need for inner change.”

A few simple paragraphs that I’m rereading in Pema Chodron’s book, “Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change” are providing the most simple narrative I can find for entering that inner change. They are about relating to the impermanent. Try these:

• “…as a way of relating to the impermanent, ever-shifting nature of our life experience, as a way of using our everyday experience to wake up, perk up, lighten up, and be more loving and conscious of other beings.”
• “…it’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation.”
• “…the fixed identity is the cause of our suffering. Looking deeper, we could say that the real cause of suffering is not being able to tolerate uncertainty — and thinking that it’s perfectly sane, perfectly normal, to deny the fundamental groundlessness of being human.”
• “We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t. We can’t escape it any more that we can escape change, any more than we can escape death.”

I want all of my events to touch some of this level. Even the ones in which I feel nervous because the time is short. Even in the ones in which I feel pressure to be very smart and “deliver” a lot of information. Even in the ones in which I suspect the participants will view a focus on impermanence as a distraction from the real work.

Here’s how I’m experimenting with some of that design. I include a question about mystery or the unknown. “Do you believe there is inherent mystery (uncertainty, unknowables) in the work you are doing? What is that?”

Though I would value digging in to those mysteries, even that isn’t necessary. Just acknowledging that there is mystery, and that this perception is shared, is enough to begin loosening up the inner worlds. And then, the rest of the meeting feels more honest, real, and useful.

Phil’s simple comment is changing how I personally show up, not just the agenda, which I suppose is the point.

asd

I like the way the single tea candle on my desk casts shadows in the early morning. The sun has not even thought of rising yet. It is a time of day when I’m settling in to write for an hour.

The candle sits at the center of a necklace of hematite, doubled over to make it a bracelet. The candle shines above, below, and through the gaps in the hematite beads. It creates a sunflower with about forty sunflower petals. A vibrant, moving flower.

Beauty moves me.

Sunflower of Shadows