General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

June 28, 2017

Leadership Is Offering A Story

I was talking with a friend this week. He was sharing with me how his work is “complicated.” A specific chunk of the conversation was about “so many things to do,” including squirrels to chase. He offered a funny line — “The road to hell is paved with many interesting squirrels to chase.” We both laughed.

My friend and I both like paying attention. Systemic awareness, and perhaps overall curiosity as a human being, will inevitably involve a few squirrels. I encouraged him to take on what he loves about it rather than just lopping it in to a category of derogatory reference.

What I really loved with this friend is an aha of further nuancing leadership amidst complicated environments (maybe a bit complex too).

The Need is Coherence — In the midst of all of those big lists that inevitably change, it’s not just whiz bang project management that is needed. It’s not just software to help coordinate. It’s not just tenacity to get done what is likely impossible. It’s not just “watching over” more diligently. Underneath complication and complexity is the need for coherence. Enough shared reference to feel connection and relatedness.
Coherence Comes From A Narrative — Yes, a story. Just like the ones that people used to read to us. Many kids love stories — my 12 year-old thrills at reading together at night or in the morning. Maybe that thrill never quite goes away. The story might be less interesting than the three bears. However, it is completely compelling. For example, a story is that “we (on team ___, at company ___) are evolving who we are. That requires commitment to our existing processes. However, it also means trying new things.” Enough simplicity to hold complexity.
Narrative Is The Job of Leaders — Sometimes it is a marketing story. Hmm…, OK. The stories I like most are the honest ones that invite us to be fully human together. Creative. Imaginative. Leaning in to rough spots. It’s funny that offering the story still feels like a soft skill to many, right. It’s not detailed spreadsheet analysis. Yet it is an equally important form of “doing.” I’m guessing that 25% of the leadership work is helping to offer the story, to create coherence for groups of people to not just be tenacious, but self-organized into their work.

We are just trying to be better humans (thus the blog name, Human to Human, H2H). In many contexts. Through participative leadership, dialogue, and change. We are just trying to be smarter together. And more thoughtful. And more creative. And more kind. About the things we care about and that we contribute in our families, communities, organizations, and worlds.

That’s the story I tell myself.

June 27, 2017

On a Narrative For Practiced Curiosity

QT is one of the gatherings that I most enjoy, the most recent of which was at my home last weekend. It’s a format with some key components woven in to a Friday through Sunday container. These include:

A Good Hello — deep purpose and intimacy of sharing what brings each of us to the gathering.
Welcoming Dreams — the subconscious
Food and Cleaning Up Together — community
Following What Has Attention — we are subjective beings that can follow simple doorways
Roles — complexity of who we are
Art — multiple mediums
Ritual — the non-cerebral
A Good Goodbye — deliberateness of tucking in.

QT’s meaning isn’t set in stone. But “Quality Time” is one of the meanings that I like most.

The above components already create a narrative. In one line, it is about “a container for friends to deliberately practice curiosity together.” If you need a “so what,” one of my favorites is “so that we can better make sense of individual and communal lives and some helpful steps or practices that grow out of that.” Peeks in to the inner world often have great impact on the projected outer world.

One layer deeper than this, beyond “one line” is something that became clear at this Utah QT gathering. It’s a kind of road map that I find myself invoking. It’s not so much of the concrete steps (turn right in 100 meters, then left at the first corner). It is more naming stages of a journey (areas to give attention to).

Say Hello — It’s a simple, yet often overlooked principle. Hello is more that saying your name, though it includes that. It is more than a go around to say where you work, thought could include that too. Hello is layered. Who are you? Why did you choose to come? What interests you? Remember that regardless of what is shared, it will be incomplete. But also remember that “hello” isn’t just a “todo.” It’s a start to growing awareness of the incompleteness of anything we say, and thus the need for some further hello.
As A Way of Saying Hello, Share What Is It Like To Be You — Oh, where to start. “What is it like to be you?” welcomes the subjective. There is no wrong answer in what you name. It’s exciting. It’s discouraging. It’s communal. It’s lonely. It’s dreadful. It’s delightful. The only requirement here is to speak what is honest for you. And to know that whatever subjective quality is shared, it is likely to be very broadly human. It is very likely something that most humans can appreciate, though perhaps, from different circumstances.
As A Way of Sharing What It Is Like To Be You, Share What Has Your Attention — Now it is drilling down a bit, right. However, again, these are subjective responses. It could be the good cup of coffee that you had this morning. It could be last nights terrorism report. It could be your pending vacation. It could be the overload of todos you carry with you on a daily basis. If it has your attention, this is permission to give it some deliberate attention — not as distraction, but rather, as key cue to follow.
As A Way of Sharing What Has Your Attention, Start With What Is In Front Of You — This is largely about permission. Most of us have pretty long lists of “shoulds” or “need toos.” Most of us feel some pressure (or wisdom) to prioritize. That’s good and fine. However, this principle of permission and freedom is a variant of “start anywhere; follow it everywhere” that I first learned from Myron Rogers in early Berkana days. It’s a premise of deep systemic integrity and perhaps even spiritual maturity.
Say Goodbye — Just as it is for hello, goodbye is more that saying “see yah!” It’s more than a rush out the door to get to the next. Practiced curiosity may be running in the background most of the time — I’d like to recommend it. However, there are some times of more deliberate curiosity that get tucked in. It’s some witnessing. It’s some gratitude. It’s a kind of deliberateness, layered perhaps again, that is never complete. Just some good wishes for self and others to carry what matters to the next, and to let go of what won’t, where it is.

Definitely enjoyable. Definitely centering — this container and narrative. And I love the nuancing of steps in the narrative.

June 26, 2017

To Be Touched

The book “Embers” by Richard Wagamese is good. Really good. Each page can be used (even randomly) as immediate direction.

It is a collection of Ojibway meditations, a few of which were fresh for me on the weekend. Here’s one used to set tone for the beginning of a thoughtful gathering:

“I don’t want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie. Touch you where the fragments of our being are, where the sediment of things that shaped us forms the verdant delta of our human story. I want to bump against you and feel the rush of contact and ask important questions and offer compelling answers, so that together we might learn to live beneath the surface, where the current bears us forward deeper into the great ocean of shared experience. This is how I want to touch and be touched — through beings — so that someday I might discover that even the skin remembers.”

Ahhh, love it!

June 22, 2017

Pause

One of the people that has taught me the most about the value of pause is Ann Linnea. Ann and I have known and appreciated each other for the last twenty years. She is cofounder of PeerSpirit and The Circle Way. She is author of books about nature, rites of passage, wilderness quests, and of course, circle. She is a good soul whose very pace of being can’t help but still the soul.

In the tradition that is The Circle Way, the pause is an essential agreement. “We agree from time to time to pause to regather our thoughts and our focus.” Often this is done with the ringing of a bell, bowl, or tingsha. I can hear Ann’s voice as clearly in my mind as I can anyones, her speaking after the pause — “I asked for the bell to give us a deliberate pause in our good thinking that is now becoming quite speedy. I want to feel deeply what is being spoken.”

Another person I’ve learned a lot about pause from is Roq Gareau. Roq is as smart and thoughtful as they come. He has “elder” written all over him. He is in his early 40s. And he is the kind of elder that I uniquely enjoy — he can turn to playful in a heartbeat. Roq is one of the most kind people I know that can come from deep eldering.

Roq has taught me about a form of pause, interruption. It’s related to pause, but different. It’s not the interruption of speaking over top of someone. It’s not the rude kind (though I get that this is sometimes needed). It’s the wise kind. I’ve often heard Roq revere interruption, in a way that continues to reverberate with me, “Our work is to interrupt the pattern of isolation that we find ourselves defaulted to in contemporary society.” This wisdom in Roq’s words is not about what follows the interruption. It’s not that level of specificity — not yet. His words are about the simple act of interrupting. Stopping. Daring to let go of the default. Taking a walk. Letting it go for a while. Interrupting physical, emotional, neural entrainment. Getting out of the deep carve.

Both pause and interruption are deep principles to me. They are practices, perhaps more understood by elders and people with eldering instinct. Pause isn’t paralysis. It isn’t freeze with fear. Pause and interruption are goto steps for me when I don’t know what to do, or when a group doesn’t know what to do. The are invitations to reground, and to trust in something less visible and less obvious. Pause and interruption challenge me, and I believe all of us, to go beyond the highly revered “doing” that contemporary culture so often demands (because there are deadlines to meet, right). Pause and interruption have a deep trust behind them, which is a rather good pattern to reinvoke in ourselves, with each other, and in the groups that we live and love our lives in, no?