“The Nautilus Awards recognize books that promote spiritual growth, conscious living & positive social change, while at the same time they stimulate the ‘imagination’ and offer the reader ‘new possibilities’ for a better life and a better world.”
They look for distinguished literary and heartfelt contributions to spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social change.
Previous winners include Deepak Chopra, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Riane Eisler, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jean Houston, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappe’, Eckhart Tolle, Lynne Twist, Andrew Weil.
I recently published an article in Personal Excellence, a journal that reaches over half a million people. Here’s the text:
WHAT IF YOU KNEW HOW to face challenging situations with a high likelihood of achieving breakthrough outcomes?
Image by David Kesser, www.davidkessler.biz/art_gallery.htm
Your success becomes more likely when you clarify a vision that energizes you and helps you turn difficult, conflicted issues into transformative leaps of commitment and achievement. By doing so, you engage the natural forces of emergent change.
All change begins with disturbance. Without disruption, there’d be no need to change. By developing a healthy relationship with disturbance, you turn resistance and denial into curiosity and creativity. Since disruption brings out strong emotions, being compassionate helps. At root, compassion means to suffer with. Compassion reminds us that we’re all in it together.
One way to engage disruption compassionately is asking possibility-oriented questions. Consider asking: Given this loss or change, what’s possible now? Asking such questions helps you generate welcoming conditions for creativity.
Engaging creatively with disruption helps you discover differences that make a difference. To maximize your creativity, generate innovative ideas, and establish new relationships, take responsibility for what you love as an act of service. This game-changing way of working liberates your heart, mind, and spirit. It calls you to pay attention to what matters most, drawing out your unique gifts and talents. Spread your wings and step up to your leadership potential.
Create welcoming conditions that provide the space to explore different perspectives. You will spark innovation, solidarity, generosity, and unexpected answers. You will discover shared meaning or purpose that unites individual needs with those of the organization, turning us- and-them divides into a spirit of we. This shift is counter-intuitive!
If you believe that to belong, you must conform, you will sacrifice to make compromises that no one likes. The result: feeling dissatisfied and isolated. Instead, collectively reflect, inviting unique expressions of what matters to you and to others. It generates breakthroughs containing what is vital to each and all of us.
When you face challenges, compassionately disruptby asking possibility-oriented questions like How can we use our unique gifts to create great results?Creatively engage diverse people by inviting everyone to take responsibility for what they love as an act of service. You’ll discover differences that make a difference. Finally, wisely renew yourself and your organization by reflectingwith othersand acting on what matters. You will turn upheaval into opportunity.
At the January 12th Tucson memorial for the six people killed when Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot, President Obama called for a more civil discourse. His message was well received (See Obama’s Call for Civil Discourse Resonates Around the Country).
Image by David Kessler, http://davidkessler.biz/art_gallery.htm
I watched FOX news for their response immediately after the president’s speech figuring they’d be his biggest detractors. I was impressed, hearing not a single critical word.
The shooting in Tucson opened the door for a deeper reflection on how we treat each other. A quiet group in Congress, the Center Aisle Caucus, is encouraging Democrats and Republications to break with custom and sit together during the upcoming State of the Union address. (See Emerson, Carnahan team up to promote civil discourse in Congress by Bill Lambrecht.)
That’s a promising beginning. Still, civil discourse isn’t just for politicians. If we each get involved, it could spark momentum to face the multitude of challenges that defy polarized haranguing. It can make creative use of our differences.
It won’t be easy. The more we know about what civil discourse looks, smells and tastes like, the more we appreciate why it matters, the more likely that, when it gets hard, we will keep working towards it.
We have some subtle challenges to overcome. Divisive forms of discourse are embedded in our culture. Advocacy, the basis of our political and legal system, is implicitly about win/lose. Dialogue, which is based in inquiry and I believe is at the heart of civil discourse, calls on different skills. And it takes practice. It’s a muscle we haven’t exercised for far too long.
When first introduced to dialogue, I remember a light bulb moment in which I discovered that deeply listening to another wasn’t so that I could turn their heartfelt beliefs into a weapon. I don’t recall the specific exchange. I just remember the response when I jumped on something another said to make my case. I hadn’t appreciated the effect my words would have on someone who made himself vulnerable by speaking his truth. His perspective was so different from my own that I just reacted. Had it not been for others wiser than me, the fragile beginnings of an open exchange would likely have died at that moment.
Years later, I appreciate the value of listening to understand, of bringing compassion – “suffering with” – as I interact with others. And I have learned that creative interactions can lead to innovative and lasting answers that serve us all. Further, they contain aspects of what each of us brings to the situation. If I listen for deeper truths – shared values often hidden within our differences – I can help us uncover breakthrough insights and actions.
Today I pay attention to people different from me trusting that even when I’m offended, I can find some kernel of wisdom at the heart of their message. Further, when married with my own deep needs and those of others, wise, resilient answers emerge.
That belief has changed how I interact with others. It requires me to listen creatively no matter how a message is delivered. Because we are human, I know that some point of connection exists. It’s up to me to seek it, even when pissed off, hurt, or triggered in some way.
Civil discourse is a pathway to addressing complex challenges because we need each other to find answers none of us can discover on our own. Creativity lives on the edges where unexpected connections occur. If we want a vibrant economy that provides good jobs, a healthy environment, excellent schools, and strong relationships with neighbors across the street and around the world, we need each other. In fact without each other, it is impossible to create the kind of democracy that, as President Obama said, “is as good as [nine year old] Christina[-Taylor Green] imagined it.”
Last year brought Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity into publication. The book brings to fruition years of pursuing a quest to understand the deeper patterns at the heart of the emergent change practices that I have found so powerful in enabling diverse, even conflicted people to discover answers to the complex issues they face.
Image by David Kessler, www.davidkessler.biz
The feedback on the book has been heart warming, People familiar with the ideas tell me that they find the book helps them get clearer about what they already know. It makes it easier to apply and to share. And people new to the ideas tell me that the notion of welcoming disruption is life changing.
Great questions! I told my friends that I needed to grow into a stronger voice for the ideas that mean so much to me. I want to live up to the book’s potential through what I say and do.
Why? Because I believe that the disruptions in our systems – economic, communication, education, governance, and others – are getting larger. And the more of us who are equipped to step in with some insight into the dynamics at play and how to deal with them, the more likely we will look back on this time and shake our heads at our crazy naiveté and wonder how we made it through the chaos. It means that we will have arrived at a high-order coherence, knowing we have become a social system that engages with its differences creatively while conscious that we are an interactive, ever-evolving whole.
Being a Voice for Ideas That Matter to Me
The practical reality of 2010 is that I have much to learn to be the voice I want for these ideas. After a round of webinars, talks, and workshops, I have run the gamut from home runs to strike-outs in sharing the ideas in the book.
The book is doing its work, bringing wonderful invitations to mentor and work with people in a range of disciplines. Among them: technology companies, the Montessori system, the mental health system, and my passion: journalism.
Recently, Bill Braswell, a manager at Microsoft, gave me several gifts in my learning journey. During a workshop on the book’s ideas, he offered a partner question to my “What’s possible now?” He asked “What matters now?” I find these questions great companions! What matters grounds us in meaning. What’s possible lifts us towards our dreams. Together, they generate a dynamic tension that draws us towards creativity and wisdom.
Bill invited me to present to my most challenging audience. People unfamiliar with patterns of change or why they should care: technology managers. I flopped. Big time. Aside from being humbled, it hit all my “I don’t know how to offer my own ideas” buttons. As I’ve reflected on what works when I’m at my best, I’ve found two answers so far: authenticity and interactivity.
Authenticity. When friends coach me, they tell me that I need to tell people about who I am. The authentic me. I have such a challenging time thinking my story might interest anyone! Bill said it in a way that may have actually sunk in. He advised I tell people:
How I got here
Why it is important to me
Why it should be important to them.
I’ve been doing that ever since. It seems to help. And goes like this:
I started exploring these ideas when I experienced Open Space Technology for the first time. I fell in love because I saw something I didn’t know was possible: that the good of the individual and the good of the collective can both be served. I always thought it had to be a tradeoff. Now I see this dynamic as an measure of success, indicating a higher-order system has emerged.
I spoke above of why it is important to me and why it should matter to others: we’re entering a time of increasing disruption and the more of us who are equipped to work with it, the more likely these times become the launch of breakthrough to more compassionate, creative, and wise societies.
Interactivity. I ran into my own judgments of the sage on the stage. It seems counter to what I’ve been about for years! Suddenly I’m the expert with the answers? I am at my best playing jazz with a group. And when there’s the face-to-face bandwidth for interactivity, it works when I find questions that spark conversations among the people present and between the group and me.
I’m sure there’s more I need to learn. I know that when the bandwidth is less, like in a webinar, I am still stymied on how to spark people’s interest in learning more.
Other Reflections
I want to honor Spirited Work – an Open Space learning community of practice that met quarterly from 1998 to 2004 to explore the intersection of being and doing – spirit and work. The seeds of what I know about emergence were not only planted but took root and started to grow through Spirited Work. I’m embarrassed to say that I never name it in the book. My dear friend, Anne Stadler, pointed it out and I was shocked to discover that I had removed the reference in my last edit, when looking for ways to shorten the Preface. While I talk about the experience, I don’t name it. Should I have the opportunity to do a second edition, Spirited Work’s influence on me will be front and center.
I have one last reflection on my growing into my voice. In talking with people who are excited by the ideas in Engaging Emergence and want to use them in their work, I want to become a better mentor. I often feel that I leave interactions having missed opportunities for further engagement. That may be fine, yet I feel there’s more I can bring. I do so much processing so quickly that it doesn’t occur to me to make my process visible to those around me.
In 2011, I plan to experiment with being more explicit about how I work with the principles and practices I name in the book. I know it’s more about providing questions than answers. The inquiries that come to mind are around:
Welcoming disturbance
What’s the nature of the disturbance that inspired you to contact me?
In terms of preparing yourself, what’s your relationship with the unknown, with the energy of the situation, with possibility?
What might be a compassionate response?
Seeking meaning
Why does it matter to you?
Given the disturbance, what matters now?
Hosting a creative response to disturbance
Given what’s meaningful, what’s possible? What intention should guide the work?
Who should be engaged (for random encounters)?
What actions make sense (that are pioneering)?
These questions draw from the different layers of disrupting and differentiating that I articulate in the book. They’re intended to uncover a path towards a new coherence. And they’re my starting point for taking my own next step into 2011.
I did a guest post for Pegasus Communications last week, providing an appetizer for my book. Below is a slightly longer version — with examples restored. If you’re looking for a taste of what it’s about, read on.
What would it mean if we knew how to face challenging situations with a high likelihood of achieving breakthrough outcomes?
Image by David Kessler, http://davidkessler.biz/art_gallery.htm
Success can occur on the scale of the Belfast Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. Or it could be in-the-making, like the Transition Town movement that supports communities to self-organize around initiatives that rebuild resilience and reduce CO2 emissions. It might be modest, as when people or groups reconcile their differences, improving the lives of families, organizations, and communities.
Since the early nineties, I’ve sought to understand how we turn difficult, often conflicted issues into transformative leaps of renewed commitment and achievement. I’ve used whole system change practices — methods that engage the diverse people of a system in creating innovative and lasting shifts in effectiveness. I’ve co-convened conferences around ambitious societal questions like: What does it mean to do journalism that matters for our communities and democracy? And I’ve delved into the science of complexity, chaos, and emergence – in which order arises out of chaos – to better understand human systems. In the process, I have noticed some useful patterns, practices, and principles for engaging the natural forces of emergent change. Here are a few highlights:
All change begins with disruption. It’s obvious if you think about it. If there were no disruption, there’d be no need to change. By developing a healthy working relationship with disturbance, we can turn resistance and denial into curiosity and creativity.
Since disruption understandably brings out strong emotions, compassion is a great attitude to cultivate. At root, compassion means “to suffer with”. In other words, compassion reminds us that we’re all in it together.
One powerful practice for engaging disruption compassionately is asking possibility-oriented questions. Consider these appreciative questions posed by people engaged in the emotional roller-coaster of journalism’s upheaval:
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has closed its doors, part of the wave of newspapers folding. Given this loss, what’s possible now?
With journalism in such upheaval, what curriculum serves journalism students well?
If not gatekeeper, what is my role as a journalist?
How do I connect community in civil conversation so that news not only informs but engages people in civil society?
Such questions help create welcoming conditions for engaging the diverse stakeholders who care about quality news and information in a democracy.
Engaging disruption creatively helps us discover differences that make a difference. At the heart of engagement is a practice that helps people to maximize creativity, generating innovative ideas and establishing new relationships.
The practice is taking responsibility for what we love, as an act of service. This game-changing way of operating liberates hearts, minds, and spirits. It calls us to pay attention to what matters most, putting our unique gifts to use. As we spread our wings — with all our diversity — it may seem like an invitation to chaos. Yet a meaningful organizing question and welcoming conditions provide spaciousness to explore differences and spark innovation, solidarity, generosity, and unexpected answers.
For example, Google is famous for giving its engineers 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. Often, the engineers form teams that create new products, improve development methods, and make customers happier. (See The Google Way: Give Engineers Room.)
Wise, resilient systems coalesce when the needs of individuals and the whole are served. Discovering shared meaning turns “us” and “them” divides into a spirit of “we”. This shift is so counterintuitive! Many of us live with an unspoken belief that to belong, we must conform. We sacrifice to make compromises that no one likes and feel more isolated as a result.
The practice of collective reflection helps surface what matters to individuals and the whole. It can generate unexpected breakthroughs containing what is vital to each and all of us.
Such reflection re-framed the state of journalism for many mainstream and new media people by making visible an industry shift: journalism still serves the public good and is now entrepreneurial. This realization inspires innovation and mobilizes leaders who have been unsure what steps to take.
What’s Possible Now?
If a turning point occurs when we experience ourselves as part of a larger system, how do we create such experiences at scale?
Joel de Rosnay, author of The Symbiotic Man, introduced the notion of “the macroscope”. Just as microscopes help us to see the infinitely small and telescopes help us to see the infinitely large, macroscopes help us to see the infinitely complex.
Creating maps, stories, art, media, computer models, or some combination of them all can provide a macroscopic view through which we come to know we fit together. It can clarify our own role and inspirr commitment to others and to a greater good.
If the challenges ahead have you stumped, don’t despair. We are ideally positioned for a promising way forward. Ask possibility-oriented questions. Engage others creatively. Reflect together on what you learn. And share your stories of upheaval turned to opportunity.
[1 Mediratta, B., & Bick, J. (2007, October 21). The Google Way: Give Engineers Room. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/jobs/21pre.html
As I’ve been thinking about the leadership skills that serve networks well, I remembered something I wrote in August 2007 about the roles that show up in emergent systems.
What I posited then was that should any of these roles be missing, the chance of coherence emerging – of finding the simplicity on the other side of complexity – is much lower.
Today I think of network leadership skills in terms of cultivating hubs and making links. Yet, as I re-read these roles, I discovered my thinking hasn’t changed much. I added “inviter” to my original list and moved “disturber” up front. Beyond that, it seems I’d ordered them in something of a temporal way – roles that support disrupting, differentiating, and cohering. My list follows the photograph.
Image by David Kessler, www.davidkessler.biz/art_gallery.htm
Okay, leadership skills may not be obvious in the picture, but I suspect there’s a lot more going on in this ecosystem that we completely grasp!
What roles would you add or change?
Disturber – Someone who brings attention to something from outside the system (a person on act of nature) that interrupts existing assumptions or patterns. It can also be someone/something from inside the system that is differentiating itself in a way that interrupts current assumptions and patterns.
Attractor – Someone(s) who asks a calling question (implicitly or explicitly) that draws people who care about the issue to come present. In formal systems, we typically call this person the sponsor.
Inviter — Someone(s) who reach out to engage the diversity of the system. Based on the intent of the calling question, who needs to be involved? Inviters are gifted and knowing how to make the connections, particularly to those who may not quite see their stake in the situation.
Guide – Someone(s) provide hospitable space for the work. Sometimes this includes a process that channels energy. Other times, it is simply ensuring the gentle structures for a nutrient environment are present. In group process work, this is the person identified as the facilitator.
The People of the System – The people who bring the varied voices of the system. The broader the definition of the system, the more diversity is in the room.
Bridge/translator – Someone(s) who can provide a sufficient hook for others in the system to connect with the disturbance/disturber. Without this role, rather than creative use of the disturbance, resistance or rejection by the system’s immune system goes up. These folks are active in the conversation, helping the rest of the group connect with what the disturber is attempting to express.
Edge worker – An easy to overlook and critical role! Edge workers generally hang at the margins. When someone checks out because they’re disturbed, an edge worker listens, sees, and honors that participant. Edge workers are gifted at staying present to what is happening for the other person, artfully reflecting back what they experience. They support others to discover the nuggets hidden in their dissonance.
Organizer – As new insights emerge, someone(s) grasps the threads and starts to weave them into a new story, one from which action flows.
Artist – Different forms of expression – words, music, art, movement – matters. Artists help us move beyond stuck places, engaging people on different channels. Art can make meaning more visible and can amplify the effectiveness of the interactions.
A colleague sent me a video of birds flocking yesterday. He was excited by the implications for self-organizing in human systems, asking what are the leadership mechanisms behind flocking?
Think about the difference between pack animals, with alpha leaders keeping others in line versus birds, ants, bees, or other animals that seem to function with no one in charge. These interactions call on different leadership skills than rising to the top of a pyramid.
What can we learn from flocks, swarms, hives, and other leader-full forms of organizing? More, how can human consciousness enhance the effectiveness of these collective forms of leadership? We live in an age in which networks are an emerging means for organizing. They are more responsive, resilient, creative, and let’s face it, more fun than most hierarchical organizations I’ve experienced. Over time, hierarchies may well give way to networks as our dominant organizational form. Understanding new leadership skills will help us transition.
Image by David Kessler, http://davidkessler.biz/art_gallery.htm
I’ve observed that leadership in social networks is a more multi-threaded phenomenon than hierarchical leadership. For example, traditionally, we rely on a few people to make strategic decisions for everyone else. Increasing complexity – a more diverse public, greater access to a broader range of perspectives, technological innovations affecting scale and scope of just about everything – makes this strategy less effective. No longer can a few people with relatively similar backgrounds and perspectives make the best choices for a whole system. Whether companies, communities, or social systems, like health care or education, networks call forth new approaches to decision making and leadership.
The Nature of Networks
Social networks are loosely connected, brought together largely by common purpose and personal passion. Following the boss’ orders just doesn’t work in networks. So how does anything get done? More basic, how do people know what needs doing?
Leadership in networks is relational, collective, and emergent. As I’ve read more about networks, two dynamics rise to the top when thinking about how they function:
hubs form and evolve; and
links connect.
How do these dynamics play out in social networks? My experience with network leadership has been influenced by a seminal experience with the Spirited Work learning community. Spirited Work met for an extended weekend four times a year over seven years. We met in Open Space, a process that supports groups in self-organizing around what matters to them. After the first couple years, the four founders did something quite unique: they stepped down as the sole leaders and invited anyone who felt called to do so to step in to steward the community. In other words, leadership became self-selected. It seemed such a great learning laboratory that I stepped in.
We, the stewards, became a hub for the Spirited Work community. We discovered that whatever challenges existed in the larger system showed up in our meetings. Stewarding was the intensive course! As we brought our diverse perspectives and interests together, we learned to listen for what was beneath the dissonance of our differences because it contained the seeds of breakthrough.
For example, early in our life, we had a financial crisis, discovering our income wasn’t covering our costs. A philosophic clash arose between paying our bills and welcoming whoever wished to participate regardless of their financial means. The larger purpose of Spirited Work – learning to link spirit to practical action on behalf of the community and the world – held us together as we worked through our differences. Ultimately, someone suggested holding an auction to raise funds. A few people took on the task and at our next gathering, the auction debuted. Not only did we clear half our debt in that first auction, people had so much fun sharing their gifts on behalf of the community, it became a regular activity. And our financial woes were permanently resolved.
Leadership and Network Hubs
From the outside, hubs in a network look a lot like hierarchical organizations. They are groups of people organized to accomplish something together. That makes it easy to confuse leadership of a hub with hierarchical leadership, thinking the same rules apply. Not! Giving orders, chain of command, top-down decision making doesn’t function when people choose whether to participate.
Hubs form because people are attracted to them. Hubs grow when people are drawn to the purpose and/or the people and believe that they can both give and/or receive something of value. The remarkable communities that maintain the Wikipedia or fill the Open Source software movement are examples of networks producing real-world benefit.
Leadership and Network Links
Link leadership is elusive because it doesn’t fit our traditional thinking about leadership. Why is connecting people or organizations a form of leadership? If you want breakthroughs, interactions among those who don’t usually meet is an essential ingredient. And when hubs connect to hubs, ideas can spread like wildfire.
While sometimes those connections are random, as often, they’re the work of people with a knack. Malcolm Gladwell famously identified three types of link leadership in his best seller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. He called them connectors, mavens, and salesmen.
Hubs and links attract different personality types. As someone who tends to be part of stewarding a hub, I have developed a complex relationship with linkers. They come late to meetings (if they show up at all). They often bring dissonant ideas from “out there”. They never really seem to fully belong to the hub. So they’re easy to discount. And doing so is always unfortunate. And I’ve discovered, they often feel unappreciated.
I’m learning to love linkers! They are late or seem outside because they spend their time with those at the margins. They are often the source of new ideas or differences that can attract others who, in the abstract are desirable, but aren’t getting involved. Skilled linkers learn how to bring outside perspectives and participants in graciously.
There’s So Much More To Say!
I could keep writing because there’s so much more to say. And even more to learn. Still, I’ll stop for now, knowing my understanding of the multiple skills and aspects of leadership in networks will continue to evolve.
They featured the post in a recent BK Communiqué. (A quick, amusing read. I recommend it!)
In the process, they offered a 30% discountfor Engaging Emergence through November 30th.
More, The Change Handbookchapters are available electronically via Fast Fundamentals for 99 cents each through the end of November. Take advantage of the sale through the links below:
This is the sort of easy-to-read book that you want to leave lying around so others will find it accidentally. Maybe they’ll recognise, as Peggy hopes, that modern life is not a predictable, steady state that is occasionally and annoyingly disrupted. Rather, life should be celebrated as an evolution of surprises, change and adaptation. Peggy provides us with a straightforward roadmap about how to constructively steward positive change.
In the last paragraph, Ron raised an issue about power (bolding is mine):
Engaging emergence requires that we talk to one another in a civil manner with mutual commitment. Perhaps wisely she has sidestepped the thorny challenge of motivating people who exercise power to graciously and generously devolve their authority to a shared enterprise. The book presumes that a situation where the practice can be exercised poses no political barriers to emergent change. Unfortunately, this would be a rare occurrence. So just like the enterprise of deliberative democracy, which requires the practice of engaging emergence, the initial challenge is just getting to step 1.
Illustration by Steven Wright
Since the challenge Ron raises is no doubt a common one, thought I’d share my exchange with him:
Thanks for your reflections on Engaging Emergence. I’m delighted at your enthusiastic response!
And I want to comment on the challenge you raised of motivating people with power. There are virtually always political barriers! Shame on me that I wasn’t more explicit on how to address them.
What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:
the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
it is critical to their success; and
they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.
Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.
I’ve experienced this shift in government agencies, like the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), and in organizations, like the Boeing Company. As Chris Innes of NIC put it so eloquently, they stepped up to “make it up as they went along” when doing the same old thing was not worth the trouble.
Peggy, thanks for your elaboration regarding motivations to stepping up. It also points our community of practice to work harder to generate opportunities using the non-instrumental language you recommend. ps, I’ve posted sections of my review to Amazon for you! Best of success!
