Human to Human: Blog and Podcast

I’ve just spent the last couple of days with Chris Corrigan, a pal among pals. We’ve done all that I’d hoped we would do. Take walks. Go to the soccer game. Have dinner with my 11 year-old, my daughter and her husband. We’ve wandered in our conversation. Some playful bantering. Some plain old good listening that sparks insight, and then another, and then another. It’s massively valuable and fun.

One of those insights has been about breaking patterns. I’ve seen Chris do this many times over the years we have known each other. Breaking patterns with how we convene people in learning. What if we didn’t set the tables this way (like we always do)? What if we didn’t start with introductions (like we always do)? What if we taught it this way (unlike we’ve always done)? There is a creativity in it. There is an honesty in it. And there is a value — breaking patterns.

Patterns can serve well, and they do. It’s good to notice. For example, using the same welcome letter for an event can be an administrative ease and an efficiency that can buy time for something else creative. It’s when pattern becomes unchallenged habit that there is more of a rub for me. “We’ve always done it that way” is a sure fire kind of trigger for me that I’m continuing to learn about.

There is something in the neural entrainment of habit that can make us rather rigid creatures, right. Neural entrainment as in ruts in our thinking, rigid, hard carved, stay-on-track routines that remind me of the ruts in the snow packed side roads that I used to drive in Edmonton, Alberta when I was an older teen. There was no real choice. You just followed. To be clear, I would say that though it is easy to become rigid creatures, most of us are well-intended rigid creatures.

Pattern breaking isn’t about pouting for the ever new, though I have done some of that. It is about recognizing that even the best of us have many ways in which new habits become congealed into mono vision and action. It’s not just a thought laziness. There is physiological rut making. Once upon a time, I suppose we as a human species survived because of this entrainment. I suspect the how-to and how-not-to hunt a woolly mammoth was important information.

I’m imaging some exercises that I might create on pattern breaking. Start simple. Fold your arms. Now, fold your arms the opposite way. That’s enough to see how such an easy act can be entrained so deeply that a simple shift is awkward. I can imagine some followup conversation in small groups. “When have you experienced a need to unlearn something?” “Is there some important unlearning that you feel we need to do here?”

Part of the job, as I see it, behind our good process and content, is pattern breaking. I’m looking forward to this kind of exercise. Well, in part, because it feels new.

Every time I work with a new client, in a first meeting, I give significant attention to what I want to ask them to start us in a good way. Typically this meeting is over the phone, or Skype, with anywhere from 1 – 5 people. Typically it is to plan some meeting or engagement that is anywhere from 1 – 9 months into the future.

Typically there are a few nerves in first meetings. Some of it is social. It’s natural — first meetings can draw out some anxieties. I feel some nerves in me. I want it to go well. I want to be honest. I want to be genuine. I want them to like me. The client is usually ready to jump right in, eager to get to the “how to do this” and the “how to do that.” It can be a bit like a first date on which one of the people starts asking about how many kids they want. Good question, just way too early.

Typically, after listening for a bit, I give them a really simplified narrative of what I believe we are trying to do together in that first meeting.

First, we are simply saying hello to each other. The hello matters. We are beginning a possible relationship together. I don’t want to be hired as a robotic facilitator and I don’t think they really want that either — “come do your thing, we will plug you in.” I want to see what kind of journey they are on and see where I might be helpful to them. Usually, when I say this to people, “we are just saying hello,” it slows us all down. It’s comforting. It’s an immediate and more helpful marker of whether we fit or not. I’m deliberately breaking a pattern (efficiency is everything) to offer a choice of not only how we are together, but how the group will be together for the engagement they are imagining.

Second, I ask two basic questions. “What is some of the story of what is going on here that has you wanting to do something?” I don’t ask for all of the story. It’s nutty to think that I will get all of the story (many sides to every story). I want to introduce them, from the get go, to a world of partial truths made up from perceptions. There is nothing dumb about the perceptions shared. It’s just that they are partial, and thus, help to make the case for listening well together, so that we might have our best chances of hearing the whole. The other part of this is that by invoking “story” it elicits, what Christina Baldwin has taught me, a somatic trance. Story immediately signals a different way of listening and engaging each other.

I take notes the whole time. Usually I use a planning tool, The Chaordic Stepping Stones (here’s a good version recently updated by my friend Chris Corrigan). This helps me to put information into a few categories that can help structure our next questions together.

The next question I ask is, “What is some of the broader story within which this is all taking place?” This invites them to speak about some more history and context. Or some bigger dreams and long horizons. I’m again being deliberate about seeing from many perspectives and giving them an immediate taste of something real, honest, and informative. A big part of the job is helping them see each other.

The third thing I do is share some of the choices that they have before them. I’ll reflect back some of what I heard. I’m usually translating the stories into a couple of key questions that if they addressed together, would help them with what they are up too. One of your choices is to engage each other, to be smart not just individually, but together. To start, or add to, their culture of turning to one another.

Then I encourage them to go away from the phone call, talk among themselves. I encourage them to discern in the best ways that they can, and to notice what stays with them, naturally, without trying.

That’s it. Those simple steps.