Human to Human • Tenneson Woolf

January 17, 2018

Take The Long Lunch

Quite often I’m in design with people to plan and host either a day-long or multi-day workshop.

Particularly with the day-long, the one-day workshop that doesn’t require a residential sleep over, inevitably, we need to decide how long lunch will be. With many, I notice that the default is to make the lunch as short as possible. Not an hour. Maybe 45 minutes. Sometimes as little as 30 minutes. Definitely not 75 or 90 minutes.

The short lunch is not the default I would recommend.

The obvious in this for me is that lunch is about far more than consuming food and going to the bathroom. This kind of nobility that many have associated with efficiency is misguided. Except when it is not, of course, which is sometimes. When we are in task mode rolling out solutions that are obvious, then I accept that there are times to just “git ‘er done.” However, let’s not make that our only mode, our only orientation to lunch — it’s not super sustainable.

In learning workshops, when people are learning new practices and paradigms, integration time matters. Rather than compressing more activity and more learning into a tight space, so often, the need is to let things settle. To welcome a non-linear, more oblique kind of learning to occur.

For this reason, most of the time, I lean to the longer lunch. And to be transparent, as a facilitator, I often find I need a bit of the extra time. While participants are having lunch, I’m often setting up what will happen when we all come back from lunch. Facilitators need a bit of break also.

I lean to a time frame that stretches the norm, so that, people even feel a bit of boredom. I don’t want to lose people to the ever available trip back to the office. I don’t want to lose them to isolated social media. What I really hope for is that people will group up together — “we’ve got time, we might as well talk.”

Long lunches are about connection. Sometimes social, to explore non-work stuff. Sometimes conversational, about questions that have percolated up from earlier in the day. Sometimes about the rare gift of time to think privately, or together, while taking a walk.

Integration isn’t to be forced. It needs time.

Just like blossoming trees need time. Or flowers. Or fields of wheat.

Integration, ideas that settle, requires the longer lunch. So much more than food. So much about giving the group permission, or just enough container, for what comes from the novelty (or awkwardness) of time.

January 16, 2018

Tools

Books are tools, right?

For me they are. Some, of course, contain descriptions of tools. For me, however, most of my books provide ideas that help me to create tools.

Sometimes the tool is a story. Sometimes, an important phrase that I can link to personal experience and story. Sometimes, the tool is a framing, a simple set of premises that change how I / we look at our experience and make sense of it.

We humans are indeed sense-making creatures. We can’t help it any more than we can help breathing. And just like our breath is sometimes shallow barely reaching our lungs, so to can our sense-making be shallow. Or restricted. Or calcified.

We humans need to relearn and expand our sense-making. We need to reclaim our breath.

We do this together. It’s just different, and more, that what we do when we are alone. And, some of us humans need to do some of this alone. It’s what helps us be in the group with good contribution.

I continue to learn this.

The stack of books above is what I carried with me in recent travel and work. I know, it was a bit crazy. However, there were passages and phrases that I wanted to have with me. I wanted the energy of them with me. Some of them I even used.

From left to right, here’s a headline from the books above, some of the tools helping me and others to see and to be awake.

Participatory Leadership Journal (Kathleen Masters, Tenneson Woolf) — I love sharing this expression of Art of Hosting with faith community leaders.

Teaching With Fire (Sam Integrator, Megan Scribner, Parker Palmer and a bunch more) — Great poems and stories of the people that selected the poems that point back to an inner and outer fire.

The Invitation (Oriah Mountain Dreamer) — Expands on an invitation, often used, to get real. “It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for…”

Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (Pema Chodron) — Invites us to lean in to the fundamental reality of a changing world within us and in the external.

The Seven Whispers (Christina Baldwin) — Christina has such a gift to distill complex life down to simple, yet profound practices.

The Exquisite Risk (Mark Nepo) — Ah, I love the depth that are in these essays that invite and challenge radical authenticity and honesty.

Walk Out Walk On (Margaret Wheatley, Deborah Frieze) — This book includes rich stories of real communities daring to step out of the paradigms and craft the future together from a different set of beliefs and practices.

The Circle Way (Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea) — Circle is the most fundamental practice and skill to be able to go together. It takes us beyond tricks and manipulation to honest and humble listening together for wise action.

To Bless The Space Between Us (John O’Donohue) — Pick a poem, any poem. Pick a blessing, any blessing. He had a gift to invoke the real and the inspiring in all of us.

Improv Wisdom (Patricia Ryan Madson) — Improv may invite a lot of play. However, it also invites a deep quality of presence together and some alternative practices to get there.

A Hidden Wholeness (Parker Palmer) — I love how this book calls out more of the relationship between our inner worlds, and our outer worlds.

7 Paths to God (Jane Borysenko) — Points to the invisible and an inherent holism.

A Simpler Way (Margaret Wheatley, Myron Rogers) — This delicious book offers a new story to carry us into a more compelling and satisfying future together.

Tools.

January 15, 2018

People Everywhere

Three years ago I wrote a short piece to be used by The Berkana Institute to support an initiative that had people gathering as Circles of Friends. The full piece is here. The gist of it included these noticings:

People everywhere yearn for connection.
People everywhere yearn for friendship.
People everywhere yearn for presence.
People everywhere yearn for community.

I would add now a further noticing and pattern. People everywhere yearn for accomplishment. Some of us lead with accomplishment, and with such intensity that we lose our memory and awareness of how connection, friendship, presence, and community shape that accomplishment, just as we forget how wind and water shape a beautiful canyon.

I really enjoyed my last two weeks of work and the people that I was able to work with. First in Carefree, Arizona with ministers that are part of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative, a cohort program convened by The United Church of Christ, Pension Board. It was great to meet in such unique geography among Saguaro, Prickly Pear, Aloe, and many other forms of desert landscape. Those are life forms that have learned to adapt and thrive in a very intense environment. The cohort that I taught on Team-Building and The Art of Hosting included many aspects of connection, friendship, presence, community, and accomplishment.

I also really enjoyed more recently and immediately, following Arizona, shifting to the open flat plains of Texas, just north of Denton. The venue for hosting 40 University of North Texas Deans, Associate Deans, Chairs, Faculty, and Senior Administration was at a place called Buffalo Valley Event Center. Yes, there were buffalo in a neighboring field, a conservation herd. There is much to learn about buffalo also that could quite inform how we humans are together. With UNT, I was part of a team (Chris Corrigan and Caitlin Frost) to help bring more of the participative leadership paradigm to helping this university become what it can, and grow from what it already is.

I am reminded from both of these events with very different people involved, that despite our many different positions and our very different environments, given time, people everywhere reawaken to some very basic desires and appreciations together. Yes, accomplishment is often what starts us on a path that is sometimes prickly and sometimes vast and open to grazing. It is further true that people everywhere yearn for what is underneath all of that — connection, friendship, presence, and community. A participant from UNT claimed it so beautifully in a closing circle — “I so often forget that my brain is connected to my soul. These last three days have been so much about remembering that connection.”

People everywhere.

January 2, 2018

It Is Human To Fall In Love, and If Lucky, To Welcome It

As a younger boy, I think in kindergarten, I remember feeling my first crush on a girl in my class. Her name was Dixie. She wore a purple shirt. I remember chasing her, and her me, on the playground. Such frolicking, and innocent fun, right.

In other stages of life, I remember other stages of love. A crush on a teacher. Being shy in middle school and high school, but eventually falling head over heals with a steady girlfriend that would shape so much of young adult life.

As life grows, I suppose perhaps, so does love. I realize that love becomes so much more than infatuation and a lot of firsts. It also becomes heavy lifting and being able to stand in a whole lot of imperfect together. It becomes grace, working with difference, a baseline of unity over years, and even a few scars to show for challenges along the way.

It is human to fall in love, isn’t it.

It is human to desire connection, isn’t it.

It is human and natural to want to be in association, isn’t it.

Something in us, I believe, knows this. From a soft or afraid heart. And from an instinct to be wise.

I’m learning about reclaiming the naturalness of wanting to be in connection, of wanting to be open to feeling love, and to being love. I’m learning, on so many layers, as people paying attention have for eons, that there is energy in love. An expansion. It’s different than the energy of fear, which so often is a contraction. And though these may be topics most often taken on by poets, they apply of course to working with teams.

I’m headed in to a week of offering a workshop on teams. How delicious. And I realize that I’m continuing to learn (in a no finish line kind of way) about love and being in love.

In love with, self.

In love with, other.

In love with, community.

In love with, silence.

In love with, rest.

In love with, challenge.

In love with, mystery.

In love with, the unknown.

In love with, uncertainty.

In love with, difference.

In love with, ease.

In love with, this moment followed by the next.

Amazing by what can get started with girls named Dixie wearing purple shirts, isn’t it.