Author: Tenneson Woolf

Here’s an oversimplified story, but it is still worth saying because it is pattern.

In my teens and twenties it seemed to me that being a man had a lot to do with being tough. Stoic. Competitive. Never letting my guard down. Outsmarting others. Never showing weakness.

In my thirties and forties it seemed to me there was more to being a man than that. There were cracks in those images. And it was just getting tiring to hold living up to those images. Silly even. It was time to learn with other men in stories, and even rituals. I started participating in a men’s retreat and varied men’s groups. Dialogue groups. Drumming circles.

In my fifties, I continue to learn about opening myself. As man, yes. As human, yes.

I’d like to think I’m reasonably evolved about these things. If I give myself permission to say it, I am quite evolved with these. Not done evolving. But have done some pretty good letting go, working with boundaries, exploring the roots of experience and feeling. And I’m through a cycle now, watching some of this earlier phase play out in my sons and other younger men, which is rather retroactively informative!

My friend Kinde Nebeker just posted a piece, “The Man of Awakened Heart.” I quite like here list of traits, which I’ve copied below. Her full post is worth a read. (Kinde is also someone that I’m starting to work with. Later in October we are offering a leadership session on “The Inner and The Outer of Evolutionary Leadership.”)

• He is able to express a full range of emotion — love, anger, compassion, fear are all alive in him. He does not squash any emotion; though he is also able to express his emotions appropriately.
•  He gives full-bodied hugs that are filled with presence and caring. He is able to hug both women and other men in this way.
•  He has the capacity to listen deeply with his full attention.
• He has gone beyond the need to live up to some ideal of manly identity. Who he actually IS as a man is enough.
• He has clear boundaries, but no armor. His boundaries are fluid, not rigid.
• He has the capacity to go into the frightening territory of his own shadow and his own vulnerability. He can stand in that vulnerability, in the place of not knowing, without trying to cover his butt.
• He has come to know and honor his own feminine energy. It is alive in him and he has a conscious relationship with that energy.
• He can take action, letting his heart give him guidance.
•  He smiles a lot because his heart has been broken repeatedly and he has let it break — standing the pain, and eventually letting his heart open wider. In doing so, that heart of his becomes the strongest muscle he has. He has the capacity to deeply love many people.

It may be an oversimplified story, but it’s worth leaning in to, no. If I go big with it, it’s worth leaning in to because it helps make conscious the choice of who men are and invites growth. Or, stay simple, it helps create awareness in the life of a dad and a son figuring out the day to day.

A friend sent this video to me on the weekend. It is six minutes on why new math matters.

I admit, there are times when I have wondered (translation, doubted) the value of new math being taught to my elementary school-aged student. I’m a rather involved parent. I like to do homework with him. I like to know what he is learning, even if he is getting it all correct.

This video is about more than math. It is about developing the ability to think conceptually. Creatively. And that applies to working with groups, yes. And, the narrative is a good challenge to the primary story of math education — efficacy and speed. Oops, there is it is again, a cultural story that is about a lot more than math.

There have been moments when I, relying on my “old school” math, wonder what my 10 year-old is thinking and why it is taking him so long. Dr. Raj Shah of the Math Plus Academy offers a good description of what I sometimes describe as the need to slow down (so that you can speed up, or, er…, not).

Conceptual and critical thinking isn’t about moving through things as quickly as possible. It’s good to have that ability, when needed. But critical thinking is called for in more and more of the complex environments we find ourselves in. The ability to see alternative conceptual frameworks — oh yea, that’s good.

I love it that this video works with a simple equation, 45 x 24, to show some of this.

 

Last night I was so happy to join colleague Jen Smith to host an evening conversation featuring Bob Stilger. Bob and I go back some 15 years now to a decade of work through The Berkana Institute. He is someone I trust. For his skills. For his kindness. For his ability to think and act. Bob is the kind of person you want on your team.

Last night’s conversation, for 15 of us, was about resilience amidst disaster. Our design was simple. First, meet each other to say hello through a check-in circle. Actually a big check in circle yet contained to 45 minutes (What is your name? Where are you from? Why are you here? All of this followed by a second round, When have you experienced the rug being pulled out from under you? What are you grateful for in that?) Second, listen to some story from Bob and his 3o or so years of work in Japan. Listen to Jen who was able to go with Bob to Japan on a learning journey in 2014. In the last four years, Bob’s work has been about creating futures even in turmoil. Third, turn to each other for engagement, What does this has to do with you? Fourth, witness ahas — Is there an aha that you take with you from tonight?

One of Bob’s stories was about molasses and waku waku. Molasses is the word Bob used to describe how most Japanese people showed up for a leadership meeting in 2011. You see, it was after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. People couldn’t look forward. There was grief. There was loss. There was complete unknown. It was heavy. Thick.

Waku waku is the Japanese word that Bob used to describe what happened to people in that meeting. When they were invited — and let’s face it, held with kindness — to engage together about what it all meant, they found a resilience inside that was excited and exciting. Waku waku was waving of hands energy. It was aha. It was discovery. It was relief. It was the synergy that people found in turning to one another, even amidst massive heaviness.

That transition from molasses to waku waku stuck with me (odd pun not intended). It’s not a “and they all lived happily ever after” story. It is a good, human to human, “as long as we are together” story. Disaster is important. Clearly. But I’ve heard Bob and Jen speak it many times, the impressive story is about what people have inside of them. Bob nailed it with a quote from one of his participants back in 2011. It was offered with a bit of shyness from the participant — could it be said out loud? “These disasters have released us from a future that we did not want.”

The human spirit does amaze, doesn’t it.

Waku waku.

 

Last week I worked with my partner Teresa Posakony, three good people from The Athena Group — Faith Trimble, Paul Horton, Steve Byers, and one “apprentice,” Ali Kingfisher who has worked many years in government, who is already a gifted host. Our offering together was a 3-day, The Art of Participative Leadership: Building Cultures of Innovation and Collective Impact.

Our process for working together as a team includes phone calls leading up to the event. We plan together. We encourage invitations together. We take care of logistics. This prepares us for what is usually a day or a day and a half of specific design for the event, which in this case was attended by 52 people not including our team.

In design, there are many choices of what to offer. There are methods — Circle, World Cafe, and Open Space Technology are musts. There are models — likely 25 that we’d like to offer. We don’t make it to all of them — maybe three at the plenary level and another 10-12 at the small group level. Though there is a kind of template of design at play, each event turns out a bit differently. It means that design is not a cookie-cutting process. It’s not replication of what was done before. It is an emergent design.

Part of what I feel helps in that process is a design narrative. It’s not the details of specific timing of exercises. It is the overarching story of what we are doing and when we are doing it. Without it, I find that participants (and hosting teams for that matter) can get confused about where we are in the process. A lot of it can jumble together in a way that leaves people quite confused about what they are taking back home with them.

The above photo is the design narrative I offered with our team this time. The tree days are roughly in columns. I divided each day into a morning and an afternoon.

Greetings — Our first job is to say hello to each other. I often will tell people that we don’t need to solve anything just yet. It is usually relieving to people. There are of course many ways to say hello. At this gathering, we included partner conversations on seven questions, each taking 2 minutes. We also included a big circle to share name, organization, and the object that people brought with them as symbol of what is important to them. We included triad conversations to begin to notice stuck points and stories that we carry about how change happens. With the intention of greeting, of saying hello, each of these took us well beyond a business card level of introduction.

Frameworks — The frameworks clarify some of the context for how we are exploring. This was a gathering about participative leadership and building cultures of innovation and collective impact. It was not about motorcycle repair. The frameworks we offered pointed people to a systems level of awareness and a new kind of leadership. In this design we used 2-Loops, a model for working with emergence, and Cynefin, a way of working with complexity. We invited people to a World Cafe to help make sense of those frameworks.

Building Capacity — The job here is to develop inner capacity and ability. The premise is that the level of shift in the world, and in our organizations, requires most of us to have more capacity. To listen. To engage. To be in unknowns. To figure it out together. To still ourselves so as not to work simply from stress. How cool to have deliberate time to do this.

Exploring — This is the time to turn to one another with our specific questions and issues to explore. We used Open Space Technology to do this. Some people started into projects. However, many stayed conceptual, which was the intent. “How can art be used in more mainstream places to promote clarity and change?” was one that I participated in.

Planning and Application — The last day is definitely a time to move energy to converging. What are you going to do with this when you get back to your office or community? The previous days support a lot of diverging, thinking that we don’t normally make time for or can’t make time for. Planning and application highlights taking responsibility for learning and harvesting.

Commitments — The last stage is clarifying commitments. This is very much about witnessing one another. For some it is in specific projects. For some it is in personal insights or practices. In this gathering we did so through a Pro-Action Cafe, and an intention-setting exercise that I modified for this group. It was a chance to return people to what they started with in their greetings to gather, but to notice what had changed.

That’s it. Just six steps. Not 60. There were of course many things that happened, but having this design narrative helps clarify context for the good work that we can relax ourselves into.