Human to Human: Blog and Podcast • Tenneson Woolf

April 3, 2017

Inklings

I met Beth Tener in 2014 at an Art of Hosting retreat that I was co-leading in Maine. I remember appreciating immediately an inner curiosity that I felt in her. Someone who could see a bigger picture, just by the kinds of questions she was asking and the insights she was sharing. A super human being. Beth and I have stayed in touch periodically through shared friends and a few sprouts of emails and blog posts.

Beth recently shared one of her blog posts that left me in a big smile. Her topic was “micro-collaborations”. Having good partners to brainstorm with. To challenge and inspire our creativity together. Relationship matters, of course.

What I loved in particular was this story she included of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis forming a small group, The Inklings.

Many people are familiar with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Behind these legendary creative books and mythic worlds is a remarkable story of collaboration. These two writers met in the English department at Oxford University in the mid 1920’s, and discovered they shared an interest in writing mythic fiction and poetry. Lewis and Tolkien formed a small group with other colleagues called The Inklings. In sharing this story in his book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer writes, “this was a pun that described them not only as writers but also as people who were searching with ‘vague or half-formed intimations and ideas.’”

The group met at a pub every Tuesday to talk about mythology and ideas. As trust in the group grew, they shared their writings. They took turns reading aloud and offered edits and critiques on one another’s work. Before this group, neither Tolkien nor Lewis had published their poems or mythic stories. The themes and ideas from The Inklings took shape within the writings of each man and made their way into the world in what are now widely popular books and movies.

Give Beth’s post(s) a good read. It’s part of the new story that many of us are inviting — multiple layers of collaboration and imagination together.

And heres to the creativity and courage for any of us with inklings.

March 30, 2017

At the Pace of Tea

This week has been a full week. Like most weeks are. Calls to be on. Meetings to join. Material to prepare. Much to fit into the space of a day, and often evening or early, early morning. I’m grateful that these are all with good people.

This week has been a week that I haven’t felt great also. Bit of an upset stomach. I’ve been telling people in my meetings and calls that I’m drinking a lot of tea. Soothing. Comforting. Feels a bit slowed down, in a kind way. I shared it with a few of my colleagues and friends, “I’m moving at the pace of tea.”

It feels like the norm of contemporary society is not the pace of tea. That’s for grannies, right. I love it that my Grandma was a tea-drinker. I have super fond memories as a kid dunking a cookie in an afternoon cup when staying with my grandparents over summers in Saskatchewan. The cup above is one of hers, given to me when she died last year.

The pace of tea isn’t the pace of coffee. Nor the pace of Red Bull. It’s not pressed to squeeze more into each moment than is physically imaginable. It is more patient. Like the feeling of cool sand on your feet on a hot summer day meant to be meandered at the beach. Tea for me is something to relax into.

One of my teachers (and friend and colleague) is Christina Baldwin. Her book The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These is a beloved gem. It’s short. Clear. Inviting. Filled with story as Christina does so well. Feels like tea.

Christina includes as one of her whispers another reference to pace — move at the pace of guidance. “In a world of speed and distraction, pace of guidance invites us to combine the practices of measured movement and listening. Speed is some guy running through the airport shouting into a cell phone. Pace is going around the block with a three-year-old and noticing everything the child is noticing.”

Pace, whether of tea, or of guidance, is an essential skill to develop in times like these. And not just for weeks of feeling upset stomachs. In fact, just maybe, there’d be fewer societally upset stomachs with the invocation of tea a bit more often.

March 29, 2017

Everything is Not What it Seems

I’ve started reading a book recommended by my partner, Teresa Posakony. It is by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman called Spontaneous Evolution. The main theme is about society participating in evolution (evolving the way we evolve) by making a significant change in beliefs and behaviors. I met Bruce Lipton once — his presentation was full and intense. He knows a lot of stuff and weaves it quite fiercely to create bridges between science and matters of spirit.

Generally speaking, I find it delicious to crack open a new book. I love the introduction and I love the table of contents, and preamble, and preface — as ways to understand the narrative arc that the author is about to invite us to ride upon. A ride is coming — that is what I love. One that might tease and tumble my imagination.

In this book, Spontaneous Evolution, Chapter 1 is titled, “What if Everything We Know is Wrong!” Funny that I just noticed it is punctuated with an exclamation point, not a question mark. The authors aren’t asking if this is true. They are asserting it.

I find it exquisite when people take on this theme of “everything we know is wrong.” It’s the river under the river. For me, more often I speak it as “all is not what it seems.” Or even more accurately, that everything is incomplete because this fantastic set of symbols that we call words, could never express the fullness of what is — it’s a good system, but remains a reductive system.

It’s the description of the nature of reality that has so often felt off to me, rendering much of the discussion and action plans that we humans create, off as well. A key first step for working and living together as teams, or families, or communities, is to be willing and able to explore the underlaying story that supports our knowing and insights. One of my colleagues has been reminding me of the need for “round world” rather than “flat world” strategies.

There’s a story in this chapter by Lipton and Bhaerman that illustrates how our perception (and certainty) can trick us. And by us, I do mean all of us. It’s not whether we will be wrong that is the issue to me. Rather, it is whether we are willing to engage with self and others about the incompleteness of it.

“Gaze into the sky on a clear, dark, moonless night, and you will see thousands of pinholes of light — each one a massive, magnificent star in a Universe too large to imagine. Focus on one star and realize that it might no longer exist but may have burned out and collapsed into space rubble eons ago. But because the star was light-years away, illumination from its former existence is still visible, serving as a navigational guide for mariners.

Now, turn your gaze from the heavens to our less-than-heavenly Earth and ask: ‘Is it possible that we have been charting our course by a burned-out philosophical star? What if our belief system about life is wrong?'”

Good, right? Following a star that has already died. I love the reference.

I think that the most important disposition that I’ve been able to offer in working with groups is to, just for a moment, help them (and me) entertain the notion that we might not have it all figured out. Curiosity is the need — that’s what I tell them. Dislocation of certainty, even for a moment — this reawakens a fundamental human quality of evolving not just what we do, but how we are together.

The willingness to engage around such vulnerability of not knowing, and just maybe, not having it all figured out — that’s a game changer.

March 28, 2017

Four Pillars — Why Talk?

Over the years, I’ve come to claim four pillars — four weight-bearing columns — that help me respond to people asking the question, “Why talk?” Sometimes the question is nuanced — “Why engage with a group?” Sometimes, the question is buried beneath piles of assumptions and efficiency habits — “Talking is nice but isn’t it really a waste of time? We don’t have time to be nice here.”

These pillars are simple. Yet have significant impact to dialogic design and encountering the subtle energy and less visible belief systems that accompany people into a room. Pillars. Not two by fours. Not willow sticks. Pillars hold up very large structures. In this case, the very large platform of trusting the imperative of working together, not just separately (though this too is essential within working together).

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 a magic, or difference, of who we are together. It is a principle 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. In human systems, talking and listening are part of that, right. Telling stories. Sharing observations. Asking questions of each other. Creating a healthy system is the work of leadership. For the long term.
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. Dialogue is a way to create together. To create thought. To create perspective. To create purpose. To create a narrative arc to hold many, many snippets of experience.
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 takes courage to go together. Patience too. But it’s not grand news to most of us. It just takes perseverance to undo a paradigm of entrenched thought and hallowed habit of individualism.

I love asking people to reflect on these pillars. And to ask them to notice their own pillars that guide their work. Consciousness of story, found in pillars, will never sell you short.