Category: General Learning

At Next Generation Leadership Initiative on Sunday, one of the important conversations I got to participate in was about hospicing systems (or teams, or committees, or initiatives). It followed a helpful teach by Quanita Roberson on “2 Loops”, which is an orientation from my early Berkana days on how systems live and how they die. Hospicing is a real thing. Physically and emotionally.

One of our participants had named his desire to further explore hospicing. Four of us gathered around a small round table to give it 45 minutes of our attention, learning, and wonder. I love how much can show up in a short period of time when people are already in an established field of learning with one another, which is what had happened on the weekend. Thanks to the good people that participated in this conversation for stirring some learnings in me.

1. Start With Commitment to Deliberate Choice of Continuing or Ending — It sounds rather obvious, but committees aren’t forever. They are often for a particular period of time. And even the long-running ones would benefit from a deliberate choice of renewal. Like the way that some married couples remove their rings at the end of a year and choose what their continuing together is. I like the idea that every year (in the context we were talking at NGLI), the group would revisit the need for the committee and whether continuing (with appreciations and improvements) would be the best thing. I like it that there awareness of ending is built into the beginning so that re-upping or ending is not just a reaction to problems, but built into the cultural expectation of being team.
2. Ritualize Endings — If it is time to end, discerned and chosen, give it a meaningful end. Not just retiring it quietly with shame. Or not speaking the end, like a family avoiding speaking about a funeral. I like it when there is a round of appreciations, both for the purpose of the group and for the people involved. Sometimes I invoke a burning of some of the appreciations so that there is a physical and alchemical shift, not just words spoken.
3. Know that A “No” is Important for a Clear “Yes” — Most of us are time-crunched (or other resource-crunched) in a way that requires us to make choices. Often, these choices are between good things, not good and bad things. It means that a shared awareness of saying no to good things is helpful to have baked in to a team’s efforts together. It’s also an invitation to share the tough decisions together.
4. Discerning Need to Participate vs Need to Be Informed — Pastors from NGLI, like so many leaders, are usually needing to manage many simultaneous and conflicting schedules. Being at all of the meetings isn’t really possible. Yet being informed, and accountable to overarching stewardship is required. This is quite connected to a more clear yes and a more clear no. It’s worth attention to preserve more full-bodied and full-spirited attention to teams rather than loosing each other to a kind of compassion fatigue.

Living systems die. Teams reach their natural end. Old efforts become composted in new initiatives and experiments. I’m grateful for growing my learning around such notions of a model I first learned 15 or so years ago.

Today I travelled from my home in Lindon, Utah to a resort and retreat center in Carefree, Arizona. It was a 90 minute flight — easy peasy. It was also an exceptionally busy airport day. Long lines. People shuffling luggage along to be checked that included skis, golf clubs, and even a surf board. People are coming from. They are going to. Some travel with excitement and anticipation. Some with sorrow and heartache.

This is the second year that I’ve been in Carefree, Arizona at this time of year. Like I did last year, I’ll again host a space of learning with my colleague and friend, Quanita Roberson. We’ll hug and embrace the group from last year, now in their fourth year of learning with another instructor at the Next Generation Leadership Initiative. These are pastors from around the United States that are part of the United Church of Christ tradition. Quanita and I will have a new cohort of 14 pastors this week focused on team-building — everything from the underlaying story to practices. I feel the gift of being here. To offer learning. And to receive a pile of learning also.

I feel joy to see these Saguaro Cacti. The Palm Trees also. The why of that is in part because they are so unlike what I grew up with. It’s a bit different that the flat and cold prairies of Alberta. Yes, the January to January comparison shows even more difference. And, no, this is not my first time seeing such landscape. But, truth is, there is something joyful that I feel to see the difference. To see variation of expression of life. To see an irrepressible quality of life in these many environments. I find this irrepressibility to be joyful — the cactus and the palms create some access — because, of course, I hope for such irrepressibility in myself and those I get to be with.

This week we’ll be stirring up plenty of learning with the UCC pastors — if all goes well. We’ll stir up some awareness, I hope. We’ll stir up some challenges, I hope. We’ll stir up some joy, I hope.

We’ll stir up some newness with one another
and some irrepressible expression of life, I hope —
in the learning process of going together
and leaning in to one another.

Team. We’ll have the luxury of a week together. The most significant part of this might just well be the welcoming of joy again, taken to deeper levels that many of us might not have imagined, that creates an essential glue in teams and humans being humans in ongoing travel that is life itself.