Category: Edited

This post is mostly my journal writing. It is personal experience that connect to helpful principles for human beings in work and community.

When I am not traveling I volunteer in my son’s school class once a week. Yes, this post has a bit of a feeling of learning the important principles at a young age. But particularly, for me, these come from noticing as a father of a child who is now in 1st grade.

A spectacular morning with Elijah. Very loving. Very playful. Very purposeful. Skillfully guided in principle. The kinds of stuff I love.

His mom dropped him off at 8:15 a.m. Tired. A bit cold. A bit grumpy. That’s OK. I know how to work with this, particularly when we are one on one and I haven’t seen him for several days.

– “I’m cold,” he says. I offer the ease of fixing that by turning the heat on. “How does that,” he points to the thermostat, “make it warm?” I see the opportunity for a fun mystery lesson and invite it. I ask if he knows where the furnace is. “No.” I ask if he wants to find it and invite him to be a detective. We find the furnace. I show him the pipes and tell him that these are secret pipes that run through the floor and ceiling. I show him the vent in his room and explain that this is how the thermostat talks to the furnace so that the heat can come through the secret pipes. I LOVE the learning. The content is interesting, but mostly I LOVE the process of getting curious together. Supporting him in his curiosity. He wasn’t satisfied to see just the vent in his room. We walked around each room upstairs and downstairs. And then I added playfully this principle — that I want to be warm, but don’t need to heat the whole house to do that.

– Elijah lays on the couch under the blanket to get warm. I tease and play with him staying close to him. I ask if he can think of lots of ways to keep himself warm. We start naming. “Have a fire. Go under a blanket. Have some hot chocolate. Have a hot bath. Exercise. Ride bikes.” It isn’t the specific naming that I care about so much. It is the curiosity and the imagining out loud together.

– We have oatmeal. Instant for today. I invite him to choose between original and apples and cinnamon. He chooses the latter. I join him with that. Principled again — invite choice and join in sometimes just to join in.

– I take him to school. We park at the end of the parking lot. “This is where we always park, isn’t it.” He is right. I reply with yes and that this is our spot. “What if someone else parked in it?” Elijah asks. I explain that it isn’t our spot but it is one that we often choose to park in. It is available for anyone though. I love again the naming of principle. We don’t have to. We choose too.

– At school, he wants to be the first to work with me. My job has been the same since the start of the school year. I work one on one with the kids, usually 3-8 in a 45 minute period. We do frequently used words and skip-counting. Each time I come I find a way to customize and play with a rather mundane task. The kids are starting to gather around wanting to be next because they know it or see it as being fun. Again, I offer choice — words or number first. And I do three things really  quickly with them. I invite relationship — comment on their shirt or ask what they did yesterday. I offer surprise in the order of the words, departures from what they expect. I challenge them to do something they think they can’t do but is really extension of pattern that they know. The can skip count by tens to 100 by remembering the song. I ask if they can do it from 100 – 200. Many say no. But then I help them to see the pattern that extends their learning. Their smiles are enormous when they realize they already know how to do it.

– The kids get excited when I come to recess. Today they wanted to chase me, which we did. Then I had them form into a circle and be in a cooperative game, passing a clap. Fun to see them shift to another surprise.

– Elijah is proud of me. He seems that way. And doesn’t want me to leave.

– Oh, and Elijah and I meditated too before school. We’ve done it before. For six minutes to match his age. Sit quietly and breath. With eyes open or shut. I try to make it easy yet purposeful. And sharing that mediation is for keeping you healthy and smart — I don’t tell him about emotional body or clarity of mind. Elijah regurgitates one of my answers when I ask why — “so that you can hear the trees.” I smile and I reinforce it with the simplicity and my belief that he will learn to hear many things in his life — that there are many things to hear.

A months worth of good, maybe more, happened in that one hour and forty-five minutes together. Eight home runs in one game — quite something.

Get curious together. Imagine out loud. Invite choice. Join in (participate). Less “have to” and more “choose to.” Invite relationship. Offer surprise. Help to see pattern. Experiment with cooperative play. Keep healthy and smart through deep listening.

Yup, just a bit of important learning and practices there that are about a whole lot more than first grade classes.

• So enjoying this morning beginning to read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. I need novel and narrative.
• Working again today with financial planners. Fascinating to me how they work at the intersection of finance, therapy, counseling.
• From my friend Kinde Nebeker on how perception is not reality: newmoonritesofpassage.com/perception-is-…
• Good piece here from my friend Helen Titchen Beeth on evolutionary entrepreneuring and properties of living systems: bit.ly/yYzdIi
• I love this kind of film. Simple. Short. People offering. Harvest. This one on generosity from Karmatube: bit.ly/y0mkiz

I have been in several conversation threads lately about these two topics. Lots of good questions being asked by people on the Art of Hosting list-serve — Can you use the Art of Hosting as a pattern for governance in organizations? Also, lots of good issues coming up with some of my local colleagues at the Salt Lake Center for Engaging Community (SLCEC) and in relation with friends in The Berkana Institute network — What is the difference between these two and in what circumstances would either be called for?

I think the reason this feels so compelling to me is that most of my work settings are in the context of networks. They are groups of people that are connected by a cause and purpose, yet most of them are free agents, if you will, trying to offer what they can when they can. Many of these people are the pioneers of the world, the social entrepreneurs that are helping experiments of the new come to form.

At SLCEC, my overall effort comes under the heading of “change, leadership, and dialogue.” We are an organization, an institution (that can do things that individuals can’t). However, none of us are salaried. What happens through the center is because one of us or a combination of us offers something. We imagine something. We create it. We offer it. We take the risk — that feels like old language here, but it serves to name some of the dynamic. Even with the organization in place, the things that get done are because some of us offer it. Some of this is assignment. However, by far, most of this is volunteered or expressed willingly to meet a need.

I recognize similar dynamics in The Berkana Institute network. And really all of the affiliations I am in where I can get my work done. Through the Art of Hosting global community, we get things done by people offering to do it for a season. With my closest working and teaching companions, we come up with ideas and then we work from principles of invitation and offering.

My Grandfather, now 94, would have related to a job. He worked 40 years or so at one company. He was defined by his job. And in that era, the organizational form that made sense was much more about rules, descriptions, policies, and governance. All of that is good. All of that is at play today.

However, the network as organizational form is much more in place today. Or the Community of Practice. These forms are not sustained by governance in the same way that the organization my Grandfather worked needed it to be. They are sustained by stewarding from particular shared agreements, values, and practices. Today, in many cases (most), we work without guaranteed funding (or cut budgets). WIthout clear org charts. Without rigid boundaries even. For me some of the words that help to explain that are self-organization, emergence, and living systems.

The point of all of this, aha for me, is that these old patterns of governance and policy and permission are not the essential patterns needed to get work done in so many of todays organizational forms. Networks call for extreme volunteerism, running wildly. If you have people who care, celebrate. If you have groups of people with so much heart that you can’t track all that is happening, enjoy that chaos. That’s a good problem to have. It is key to the new organizational forms of these days. Humans in networks call for and ask for heartfull engagement, peer leadership — not authoritarian blessings or disapprovals.

Governance. Know when to focus on this model. Use it when it helps. Stewardship. Know when to experiment with this. Stewardship may feel more messy. It’s easy to default to governance. But noticing how that default chokes the lifeline of a network — well, there is a skill set important for all of us to develop. Learn to work in the mass that is a network. And notice how much things have changed in how things get done, even within organizations. Now through communities, networks, groups of people that want to do some good in the world.

Quite exciting really.

Saturday I skied for the first time in about a year. And before that, for the first time in about five years. This time it was at a place called Stevens Pass, just north of Seattle. Lots and lots of powder. Lots of good remembering from my ski muscles, along with a few achy muscles at the end of the day. It takes a fair amount of work to get ready to ski. Sometimes to the point of wondering why I’m doing this. First run helps me to remember how much I love being out like that. Big open spaces. Fresh air. Movement of body in relation to the mountain.

I love learning through my body. And through play and exercise. It helps me remember important learnings that help me to understand more of the medium of facilitation and consciousness shifting that I’m in in all of my work. There were two particular points that I appreciated Saturday.

First, with all of that snow that continued all day, there were some places where visibility was really low. Though my preference by far is to see the hill, not being able to do so I find heightens my other senses. I had to feel the hill. In my legs. In my hips. Absorb what was coming not because I could see it in advance, but rather, feel it in the moment. This feels like one of those good capacities for leadership today. Feel it in the moment. Not everything can be tracked out front.

Second, was from listening to one of the ski instructors at the top of the run. This was a man that was teaching younger kids how to ski. He was telling them three things. One was how to grip their poles. Two was to bend their arms and the elbows keeping their hands in front of them. Three was the kicker, to lean down hill. Skiing isn’t to be met with a hesitancy. Easier said that done perhaps. It actually becomes easier in the learning and in the relearning later in life. You have to lean in to the piece that gives you movement. You have to lean into what sometimes you feel hesitant to do.

Well, good learnings at a lot of levels here. I’m glad to have had a great day skiing and to remember in my body these learnings.