Category: General Learning

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.

This is a three minute video that has gone viral in the last week.

It is a six year old in Surrey, British Columbia talking to her Mom about being kind and getting a long.

It’s worth the watch.

Twenty-five years ago I was in grad school. One of my best new pals was a guy named John. John and I immediately hit it off. He was a person who was able to challenge assumptions. It meant that conversation and learning with him was always easy because he was good at clarifying assumptions, and in many cases, willing to leave things unresolved. Everything from some of the school assignments to grand philosophies of life. This was refreshing and essential for me.

In those days our program had our own separate lounge. It was a place to meet. Study. Leave a few things that you didn’t want to carry with you during the day. It was a place to just hang out too. Our program had 40 people in it.

John was known for hanging out in the lounge. We all did, but he was the person who seemed to always be there. I remember being in the lounge, needing to leave for a class, then returning after class to find John still there on the couch but now talking with different people. By the way, John was a top student — definitely top third in GPA.

John was famous for asking “what does it all mean” questions. We spent many hours and days over those years pondering meaning. One day he asked me, a bit playfully, “Tenneson, if you could sum it up in one sentence, one truth, what would that be?” I laughed. Then spit out, “choice exists.” It’s the best that I could come up with. I wanted to play the game with John.

I suppose I feel kind of proud having lived with “choice exists” now for 25 years. Choice exists. Choice in action (the blue or the red). Choice in thought (to be curious or judging). Choice in assumption (cultural story A or B). Even choice in emotion (frustrated or accepting). Choice, more than this “or” that, a fundamentally liberating principle and reminder. This later became a key root of parenting for me. “There is always another way,” I told my kids often, who are now 20, 18, and 10. Over the last many years they have rolled their eyes at me a time or two as I’ve shared this with them. They’ve also used it back at me a time or two, with particular satisfaction when they’ve been trying to do stuff that I don’t necessarily agree with.

In working with clients and teams professionally, I realize I’m looking for the most basic of reference points so as to ground our work. I say it a bit differently now. “We have choices.” How do we create a culture of trust and learning? We have choices. Even, “You have choices.” Is it possible to change the format of a large conference to something more participative? I can answer yes, which I do. But even more often, I reference choices. We have choices.

“We have choices,” breaks a spell, the trance that tells us we can’t do. That’s it’s not possible. “We have choices” is not a rah, rah speech. I suppose it could feel like that. It’s a reminder of something that many of us once knew, or that we occasionally forget.

Ah, an ode to John, my buddy from so long ago who by just being him, sparked a lifetime of thought for me.

Choice exists.