General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

November 8, 2016

From Weird to Wyrd

Below is excerpt from an article I wrote this week. It’s about reclaiming wisdom and process methodology that goes with it. Enjoy.

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I want it to feel more normal to gather in circle.

By normal, I mean expected. Anticipated. I mean, the norm, what we know instinctively to do. And by where this would happen, I mean almost everywhere. In project team meetings. I mean, in government committees. I mean, in every form of staff meeting. I want circle to be met less with a groan and a derogatory Kum ba yah reference — did you know that “Kum ba ya” was originally a spiritual song invoking God to help those in need, literally, “come by here.” I’m glad to see that, in an increasing number and range of places, circle is a key practice methodology of leadership. It’s not the only way to meet. It’s just often one of the most important ways to meet to be smarter together, and more honest, and to help those in need, including ourselves.

I want it to feel really weird to not gather in circle.

By weird, I mean being in a meeting that doesn’t begin with some gesture of hello. Some genuine acknowledgement of meeting for a specific purpose, and that requires full attention with one another. Not just plowing into the agenda, or the solutions being sold rather than the problems and opportunities being explored. Not just racing to get done as fast as possible, so as to move on to another plateful of additional meetings. That’s weird, right. Isn’t there some part of all of us that has us girdering resolve, rolling our eyes figuratively and literally, to get through these formats.

Contemporary culture is searching, increasingly so, for more meaning and wisdom together. Desperately. I believe this and see it with so many that I work with. Yet, so often, it is our own habituated behavior and thought, doing more of the same, that blocks us, impedes us, and renders simple alternatives unimaginable.

The Circle Way, from my now 20+ years of experience, helps to remove the weird and replace it with “wyrd.” In old English, “wyrd,” from which the word “weird” has evolved, had a very different meaning and usage. It had connotation of being able to see “an invisible connection in all things,” or to see “the thin lines between the lands of the living and the ancestors.” Wyrd, was a word that connoted wisdom. “Weird” in contemporary use, is far from that. Not listening well together in today’s meeting culture is weird. Use of The Circle Way, well, that is really word…

November 7, 2016

This Is How War Begins

Thanks Charles Eisenstein for this post below.

What I most relate to is that what is at stake here, is less about a particular candidate, and more about how we humans respond to runaway polarization. Sure, the candidate elected will influence a good chunk of the future. Maybe dangerously so. Maybe a fifty year setback of one sort or another. But I’m enough of a systems person to take with a grain of salt the hyperbole of promises masqueraded as common sense. Let’s face it, regardless of outcome, the first 100 days are more likely to be filled with either legal, vitriolic posturing or watch-your-back defensiveness and self-preservation, than good-hearted, collaborative, and inspired leadership. The troops have been and are rallying with promises to investigate more of this and more of that rendering a good chunk of our politicians simply taking up space. The system creates this — turns otherwise pretty good folk into rather frightening creatures.

It’s just cleanup time for most of us. The cleanup is less about celebratory debris from a ticker tape parade. It’s more about grabbing a broom and sweeping up some of the waste left behind of a deep spiral of collective immaturity. Our jobs, all of us, will be less about marveling over our respective candidates, should our favorites win, or decrying injustice should our favorites lose. Our jobs are to return to kindness with those in front of us. Have a cup of tea together. Help push a car out of the snow. Offer a random act of kindness, then another. What’s at stake is restoring visibility of human goodness. Keep it simple.

“Their stupidity is amusing.”
“Stopping Trump is essential. Anyone who says otherwise is either foolish or blinded by privilege.”
“People should get hated for voting for Johnson because he is a moron.”
“Are Trump supporters too dumb to know they’re dumb?”
“Hillbots have complete inability to do anything except parrot their hero Shillary’s endless lies”
“Anyone who votes for Killary has already been drugged and taken the stupid pill.”
“They will never change.”
“Disgusting, twisted human beings.”

Anyone who reads Facebook or pretty much any political website is sure to see comments like these that dehumanize not only the opposing candidate, but the candidate’s supporters too. This polarization and vitriol, unprecedented in my lifetime, has me more concerned than the prospect of an evil candidate winning. It is as if what is really going on here is a preparation for civil war.

November 3, 2016

Exploring The Unknown

Periodically I get email from the Human Systems Dynamics Institute. I haven’t been to one of their programs, but I find my attention is often sparked when I read their materials. Founder, Glenda Eoyang and I have have met at a few events — I think one of them was Authentic Leadership in Action a few years ago.

Today’s email from HSD included a quote from Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist — that is a really cool field, isn’t it. How can it not be, when so much attention is given to the very nature of what is real.

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.
– Brian Greene

This is a simple statement, yet packed with implications.

One, let’s face it, the unknown is a big and vast category. I always say, and it feels true, that there is more unknown that known. I’m not really trying to quantify it. But the disposition created, or mood, when naming the unknown as a category (and myth-busting the belief that all is known or knowable) just creates a whole lot more desire and willingness to explore together. It shifts a team from the stickiness of arguing its certainties to the openness of wondering its nuanced questions.

Two, and related of course, is that uncertainty is as common as the air we breath. Its not really an occasional thing. Which makes “tolerating” even seem funny. Air is essential. Coming in to relationship with uncertainty is also essential. I see the uncertainty in the everyday, even though there is part of me that wants to resist. “Tolerating” is a bit more like enduring until it goes away — like you would a bad movie. I think I’m on a mission with myself and with the groups that I work with to not just tolerate, but to embrace uncertainty.

No, I’m not taking issue with Brian Greene. Rather, am thanking him and people like Glenda who are evolving the edges into what I hope are becoming everyday practices and orientations that change who we are in teams, and who we are as a species.

November 2, 2016

Detachment

Dry Canyon

My Buddhist friends remind me of the importance of detachment. From a “precious certainty” (about how a project should work, or about the big stuff, how the world should work). From an idea (it’s just one way of thinking, but here is another). From a story (he is supposed to take care of himself — why isn’t he). Even from a person, or perhaps more accurately, from the complex web of emotion and energy that that person, and each of us, are.

Detachment is a practice. Detachment is an orientation. Detachment is an awareness. It doesn’t come without resistance, struggle, or even just some straight up pissed off moments.

My friend Quanita Roberson reminds me, that in the oddity of life, there is a difference between “letting go” and “being willing to let go.” This rings true with my experience, but it is something I’ve only learned after crossing a finish line. It wasn’t something that I knew, or could know, at the start of the race.

Letting go, and detachment, require a full willingness. Wether or not the actual letting go will be required, is a cognitive wondering that impedes the spiritual path of detachment. Am I willing to move. Am I willing to let go of, or take, the job. Am I willing to say no to the worry. Am I willing to let go of my precious story.

My learning is that words and thoughts are part of such inquiry and development. But even more so, periods and places of silence, whether internally invoked, or external and physical, like the one in the above photo, from a hillside near where I live. Not talking. Not lost in media. Not lost in the ball game. When I get detached enough, by the way, then the not talking, no media, and not watching the ball game take on a different flavor. Funny, right.

Going right to the edge, and then beyond, is the only place that one can recognize, that willingness is enough. It’s a bit mind and spirit boggling to me. But also, very attractive.

I join with my Buddhist friends in naming and believing that so many of the crises that we face individually, communally, and societally are issues of spirit now. There is much work to get done. Yup. And there is much spirit and consciousness to evolve. That too. The practice and orientation of detachment is what I continue to learn, matters essentially.