#participativeleadership • Tenneson Woolf

September 15, 2016

Why Talk — An Exercise

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In working this week with Paul Horton (co-host) and a group of 25 public health leaders, I created an exercise called Why Talk. The version below was 45 minutes. I would love to try it in 90 minutes. My hope in offering “Why Talk” was to help people find more clarity on the story that they hold (or can choose) for hosting participative process.

Intro — I shared a story of a colleague who has been asking when to invite participation and when not to. I also shared the importance of underlaying story of participative leadership — reason and purpose that is beyond, “it’s nice.”

Private Journaling — I had them use a folded piece of paper to list five reasons that they know in themselves or that they’ve seen in others about why NOT to talk. Could be anything — takes too much time; makes me nervous, etc.

Partner Conversation about Why NOT Talk — I gave them five minutes. There was a lot of energy.

Popcorn Harvest — With the full group. I wrote their responses on a flip chart.

Private Journaling — On the next page of the folded piece of paper, list three reasons that are honest, succinct, and real about why talk. Again, could be anything — to get information, to build relationships.

Partner Conversation about Why Talk — Different partner than the first time.

Popcorn Harvest — As before. However, I realized that I wanted a bit of further nuancing. I asked them about “why engage with a group” to see if that would shift responses. People generally felt it did — shifted the attention from personal to the value of the group, which is really what I was hoping to bring forward.

Further Prompts — I asked what their description would be with particular personalities. Why engage with the group when you are talking with someone who really gets it. With someone who is really cynical. With someone who is really busy. With someone who is really gooey appreciative. Trying to help participants identify what is honest for them.

Four Pillars — I offered what I have found to be my most helpful versions of Why Talk, or Why Engage The Group.

People support what they create. This is a principle that starts to lead to action. It’s easy to get that people want to act together. People want to do good. Talking together creates essential condition for that action to occur in a more sustainable way. So does listening. So does harvesting.

Who we are together is different and more than who we are alone. This is one that I learned over and over with Margaret Wheatley. Since the early 90s she has been encouraging people to see systemically, knowing that engagement with one another gives us access to the magic, or difference, of who we are together. It is a person of “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

If you want a system to be healthy, connect it to more of itself. This is a biological principle that I connect back to Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist and philosopher. Talking and listening are part of that, right. Telling stories. Sharing observations. Asking questions of each other. To create a healthy system, which is the work of leadership.

If you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go further, go together. This is an African proverb that I learned in my early days with The Berkana Institute, where we were encouraging process to help us go together. To help us remember a kind of belonging together. Talking, listening, harvesting creates belonging.

It was fun to create this and offer it. Helping people move a litter further from imposing a set of tools to understanding a story on which to clarify intent and that have freedom to create and use tools with more purpose.

September 14, 2016

H O L Y

In the work I’ve done with faith communities over the last ten years, I have particularly appreciated clergy and lay people who are able to be in the seriousness of the work, and, the playfulness of the work. Ministry, be it formally leading a parish or growing an organic farm, is serious, right. I think of it as the work and life of deepening souls together. That’s individually and collectively. I love it that this deepening can be simple — we are just creating a pattern of asking questions together and being honest together. It is deeply satisfying to me to be with people who give real attention to matters of spirit.

A few years ago, while planning for an event, it was my friend and colleague Erin Gilmore, a pastor within the United Church of Christ tradition, that named, Holy Mischief-Making. She was riffing off of a “strategic mischief-making” reference that I was speaking. It seemed, just for a moment, that the cheekiness and naughtiness of mischief-making was attached to holy. Holy, with the divine. Holy, what matters when we are older and beyond the rush of the days. Holy, that which is real from deep within. I love the way that Erin smiled when she said it, and the way we both laughed out loud — “you just said that, right?”

Last week, I was reading a piece that a friend and colleague wrote, Ivy Thomas. Ivy has been among other things, a Conference Minister for the United Church of Canada. Ivy was rewriting basic agreements for The Circle Way into the context of using Circle at church. What she came up with was the acronym, “HOLY.”

Hold stories in confidence.

Open to the needs of others and yourself.

Listen with compassion and curiosity.

Yield to moments of silence.

Good, right. Simple (which so often is a form of holy to me). Clear. An invitation to practice (not a checklist from which to chastise). Thank you Ivy, for your seriousness and playfulness balled in to these statements. Ivy’s full pamphlet on using The Circle Way in faith communities will soon be available on The Circle Way website.

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.

May 26, 2016

It’s As Simple As

I’m a fan of “it’s as simple as” statements. In particular, the ones that come after an experience or ordeal that are spoken from the gut. There are things that you can’t know before the experience. There are thoughts that can’t be sorted until there has been some settling down from our good minds. There are insights and clarity that can’t occur until one let’s go, hands to the sky (or earth if you prefer) in a kind of surrender.

It was the early 20th century American legal great, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that is the source of one of the quotes that I most use when talking about simplicity. “I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity. But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” It’s the difference between reductionism that is convenient but has very little to do with accuracy (the before complexity) and the gut-check clarity that comes often with a real economy of words (the other side of complexity).

In the month of May I have helped to facilitate and host two multi-day leadership events. Both of these had 40+ participants. Both involved some good teaching, some solid interacting and befriending one another. Both involved some moments of deep dive, in which the level of voice dropped a bit in tone and speed to make way for the less-often truth-telling and simplicity that Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of.

At both of these events, in the closing words, the last bits of gratitude spoken to those who have participated, and the tucking in of overarching narrative, I’ve found myself speaking, “Maybe it’s as simple as” statements. In one, “Maybe it is a simple as being willing to turn to one another with our stories, our good questions, and our willingness to lean in together. The rest has a way of taking care of itself.” At the other, “Maybe it’s as simple as being willing to take a journey together, to dare to be simple. Just like Hobbits (yes, I invoked a Tolkien reference), who take epic journeys to mountains to accomplish daunting tasks, with little more than their backpacks and a group of good friends.”

I have seen a pattern often that I saw in both of these events. Come together. Touch a center with one another. Then return to our respective jobs, teams, families, and communities — changed. Dwelling in learning. Long enough to feel a shared, simple belonging and imagination. Then going about our business, knowing that we can return together to touch the center again, changed by the awareness that it is perhaps as simple as turning to one another, and simple as being willing to take the journey together that makes all the difference.