General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

September 13, 2016

Perpetually Perplexing

the-great-salt-lake

I fly a fair amount. My “home” airport is Salt Lake City, Utah. The airport sits south and east of The Great Salt Lake. The picture above is from the plane, on a September flight, of The Great Salt Lake. Doesn’t look like much of a lake, does it. This picture shows much that has receded in this year’s hot summer.

The Great Salt Lake is perplexing to me. Perpetually. It’s a shallow lake, averaging 16 feet in depth. It’s a long lake, 75 ish miles. It’s a big lake, 28 ish miles wide — but all of that varies widely due to spring runoff and summer evaporation. The surface area can vary plus or minus 50%! It’s salt water, which when combined with the heat, seems to produce really interesting colors in both the water and what is left on the dried land.

The Great Salt Lake isn’t a consistent image to me. Each time I fly (twice a month, generally), if I’m by a window, I’m not sure what I will see. There’s no fixed image — “Yah, whatever — that’s the lake. I’ve seen it before.” It varies a lot.

I suppose one of the impressions that I appreciate from the lake is that it is perplexing. It reminds me that in the work I get to do with groups, there is much that is also perplexing. Much that isn’t certain. Much that doesn’t look the way that one might think it should look. It takes some curiosity, perpetually.

Perpetual perplexity that requires perpetual curiosity. Yup, I’m OK calling that home, and inviting it with others.

September 12, 2016

Connective Tissue

It was as an undergrad university student that I remember first learning about the corpus callosum, the connective tissue that links the left and right hemispheres of our brains. I was at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s. I was studying psychology. One of my grandmothers had taught me before about typical differences in left brain and right brain. I remember my professor marveling about the millions of connections that help these two hemispheres (I thought of it as two brains) talk to each other. Without the connective tissue we are very different humans.

That image of the corpus callosum has remained with me through these years. A bit like an old postcard buried underneath papers and pens and scissors and paperclips and rubber bands in a junk drawer — I don’t think of it every day, but it is there. The corpus callosum — the connective tissue — has proven really helpful as I’ve tried to understand more about energetic fields in groups of people meeting, learning, and planning together. You see, I’ve hosted many groups over the years (sheesh — decades). I’ve hosted many circles. I’ve hosted many times when I’ve been trying to understand more about what is happening in those groups that feels so energizing. Why are they connected so well? What further questions will help connect the group? What will help them / us move our attention to actions and experiments?

I have observed many times the phenomenon that is, “when together, it all seems so clear. But then when apart, what once was so clear, becomes much more difficult to remember.” I’ve felt silly. What’s wrong with my brain. With groups, thinking about designs for upcoming workshops, feeling it is crystal clear and that I don’t even need to write it down (or save writing it down until after the workshop). More times that not, I’ve lost the clarity after the workshop. A bit like losing the dream that felt so unforgettable in the the night that is completely beyond awareness a mere thirty minutes later in waking. The connection is gone. The connection to a kind of group knowing.

Energetic fields are like that. In short, I believe that interaction emits energy (never mind good or bad or other for the moment). Interaction — conversations, sharing stories, asking questions, playing. I feel like my work, a layer of the deeper work, is so often about hosting a container to help organize the energy of many interactions. It’s creating a kind of connective tissue. A corpus callosum. The group brain connected to itself, if only even for a momentary experience that can be remembered later.

September 8, 2016

Donate The Wobble

When I work with groups, at the beginning I often give them a heads-up that what we do will likely have some wobbles in it. I try to free myself, and all of us, from the pressure (and fantasy) that it will all be “neat and tidy.” Or worse, though I realize I don’t always say it out loud, “cute, neat, and tidy.”

One of the ways that I offer that heads-up is by referencing Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. It’s a model of divergence and convergence that many people use. Yes, in a super brief way, I reference it as a choice of how we will learn together. Yes, I typically will say something about taking time to breath, to share stories, to ask questions with each other. I invite them to consider options — not just jump straight to solutions (OK, sometimes it is exploring the choice of solutions and fleshing them out). In the middle of that good exploring together can come a “groan zone.” It’s a wobble. It’s the not neat and tidy part. Definitely not the cute part. It’s the time when people can be frustrated. Confused. Angry even. When nothing feels certain — which can be plain yucky. I have to remind myself, the job then is to hold the container so that a breakthrough can occur. My hope is that the breakthrough, the aha, the recommendation from the groan zone is one that couldn’t have happened without the wobble. It’s key learning. It’s the time to get real. It’s the time to interrupt patterns of surface thinking (which we all have, and all institutions have) to invite a new pattern that embraces complexity and uncertainty (which, I would say, all need, all institutions need).

Yesterday in conversation with three colleagues that I love and trust, we were talking a bit about this wobble. That, and an outfit from the same closet — shadow. I loved what one of my colleagues said. “Donate the wobble and then create a learning environment that will not harm.” This colleague was referencing many years of hosting workshops, over which she learned that she would wait for the wobble, knowing that it would give the group access to a much needed and helpful learning place. If it didn’t come, she’d “donate” it. Through her own words. Her own question. Her own story. Her own vulnerability. To be clear, with her, I didn’t take that as showmanship. I did take it as wisdom. Kindness too.

In the story I tell myself, people are thirsty, even parched, for realness together. For some of us, it’s still lurking underneath the surface. We can’t see it. Find it. Hold it long enough. We fear harm if we dive into that water. Yet when we encounter it — the courage and honesty to be in the wobble — often with the encouragement of our friends or colleagues, it changes everything.

September 7, 2016

Not Rushing On the Inside

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Yesterday was a full, full day. Six phone calls / meetings that were an hour long. I started at 7:00 a.m. with necessary preparation (after returning the evening before from a holiday weekend with my son — it was a transition that required some compulsion). I finished just before 8:00 p.m. What space there was in between was largely about todos resulting from calls, or prepping for the next call, or tabling (literally) some of what could wait for later in the week. They were all good calls. With good people. And satisfying. Just full.

It was my last call of the day, with Kinde Nebeker, when I realized how much of an aversion I have to rushing, which is a lot of what I felt I was doing during that full day. Kinde has become a good friend. She’s got a deep soul that calls out more of the deep soul in me. We make sure that we have a good check-in and a deliberate check-out. In the middle was lots of good imagining for the upcoming series that we are hosting, The Inner and Outer of Evolutionary Leadership: Knowing Our Nature. We both got excited about this. It builds on what we hosted previously in the Spring.

It was in our check-out that I realized something. I shared with Kinde that I was feeling the rush of things. All of those meetings. All of those todos. A growing list that is big enough that I need some luck and some real patience to get it all done. I discovered it, aha style, as I was saying it out loud to Kinde. “I don’t like to rush. I’m not at that stage of life. Depth matters more to me. But I do enjoy the buzz of getting things done. It’s just that I don’t want to feel rushed in here, on the inside,” I said, gesturing towards my torso and belly. “I don’t want to feel ungrounded here, or unpresent here.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Kinde and I were talking about presence. It is a big part of the series we are offering together.

Well, I know that many people I work with feel a similar rushed and hurried pressure. A hurry. A worry. A fear. A juggling of a deadline. An enslavement to a schedule that is not their creation. An obligation to organizational patterns and habits that haven’t been interrupted or challenged in weeks, months, or even years. “Why are we doing it that way? — Because that’s the way we’ve always done it (and we don’t have time to rethink how we are doing it).” Argh! That’s rough isn’t it. The battle grounds that are institutional and organizational life require coping with this reality in very brave ways. We share our busyness, and our ungroundedness — the rushed on the inside parts — like they are battle scars that we are proud of. And then we move on, finishing that last sip of coffee, back to the battle. I bet you’ve seen some of this, right. Sigh.

What if, we created more room for the calming and presencing on the inside? More of the inner work that so changes the outer work. More of the presencing that makes a big difference in the outer convening. I think it is what many of us are doing. And what many of us, institutionally need to do — I meet people everywhere desperate for depth and meaning.

Not so rushed on the inside.