Category: General Learning

In the last few days I have been paying a lot of attention to fire. Literally, in the home that I’m staying in where 12 of us are meeting in relation to The Circle Way. There is a corner fire place in which I’ve placed logs periodically to keep the flame present in our day. When the flame has burned to mere embers, I’ve stuck my face near the fire to blow deep breaths and watch orange embers come back to spontaneous blue, yellow, and white flame. I love fires. They remain, an event to me. A treat.

I’ve also been paying attention to the image of fire keeping, one of the metaphors the 12 of us have invoked together. You see, we are in the complex work of shifting a body of work, Circle, from founders, Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea of PeerSpirit, to a broader network of practitioners, to release the form and practice into another level of scale and service in the world. Whew! It’s a long sentence, but simple in concept.

I woke up remembering this poem by Judy Sorum Brown, an American poet, writer, and change leader who was part of creating the Society for Organizational Learning. It’s a poem I’ve used many times before, but not recently. It’s a solid reminder for any of us working literally and figuratively with fire.

FIRE ~ Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

Some things just make me say a genuine out loud, “hmmm?” With my friend and colleague Kinde Nebeker, there is a lot of that. We continue to explore the topic of Evolutionary Leadership. We are developing curriculum. We are adding participative process for workshops. We are searching into the center of what this is. It’s one of those really delightful inquiries that I find myself looking forward to in the day.

One aspect that I found myself noticing this week is how evolution often connotes a natural process that arrives when the time is right. Not “forcing something in to being prematurely.” Rather, when the conditions are prominent enough to require the beginning of a significant shift.  Walking on two feet didn’t happen in the first days of our species. The white peppered moth did not become the black sooty moth overnight.

There is an inevitability to evolution. Because people and species adapt, inherently. Arguably, because a species is born to adapt. In humans, biologically, yes. But also emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. That doesn’t mean that we as humans in the 21st century don’t fight it and resist it sometimes. It doesn’t mean that we don’t try to help a shift arrive before its time. We do that sometimes too. But there is an “already happening” quality to it isn’t there.

In leadership, I wonder what is already happening and inevitably arriving. Like the awareness that we are wiser together rather than alone. Like the procedural choice to convene people and create interaction rather than separation. Like the approaches that welcome not just brain intelligence, but also emotional intelligence and intuitive intelligence.

Ah, there is more. But this is a teaser. A missive of thought-in-progress that continues to intrigue. And points my inquiry to notice and try on the lenses that have me seeing “inevitable arriving” rather than “forcing.” Hmmm?

A friend emailed me today. She shared her appreciation for a recent event that I got to co-host on the inner and outer of evolutionary leadership.

My friend asks, “How can I marry the inner to the outer?” Her question is a response to naming many valuable inner practices — meditation, breath, time in nature, slowing down — and longing for those, or the feeling created by them, to be part of the everyday teams and meetings that we are all part of.

Earlier today, another two people that I’m coaching asked a question about meeting format. They were asking a similar question about the outer. I gave them simple suggestions, in this case, to help shift a meeting from unintended passive listening to deliberate engagement with one another. I shared the basic story — you want them to turn to each other, to discover meaning together, rather than just hearing it from one person, albeit a smart person.

I suggested three rounds of questions to engage. 1) What was meaningful to you in what you just heard? 2) What does that have to do with us? 3) What does this inspire you to do?

Here’s the point. Turning to one another to share story and be in questions together activates an inner quality through an outer act. I’ve observed this many times. People who don’t know each other become close quickly, because they have shared authentically. Even people who already know each other become closer, often in surprising ways.

The surprise that I love seeing is when people recognize that by this turning to one another, they have experienced something joyful, and, that they got a lot done — sometimes the next steps to a project.

This header of evolutionary leadership continues to feel promising to me. In part, because it creates this marriage that my first friend was speaking, reminding us of what is possible yet has often been trained out of us.