Archive for October, 2009

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“No straight lines make up my life, all my roads have bends;
No clearcut beginnings; so far, no dead ends.”
Tom Chapin (American singer/songwriter b. 1945)

“You’re searching, Joe, for things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings — there are no such things. There are only middles.”
Robert Frost (American poet, 1874-1963)

“There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.”
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Buhddist meditation teacher, 1939 – 1987)

Recently I have been thinking about what can we do when we are in the middle of a particular set of circumstances in which what’s happening doesn’t seem to make sense or it seems impossible to find the way forward?

One response I’ve had to this questions has been to think that in these kinds of circumstances we are likely to be better served by paying more attention to preparation than to planning. That is to say that, if I try to plan my way forward in response to enigmatic circumstances, I almost immediately limit the possibilities. In a sense I have already placed my bets on the best actions to take, people to talk to, ideas and frameworks to use etc. If, on the other hand I prepare myself to be surprised and discover, perhaps even in things that I have regarded as completely familiar, I will notice and be able to followup on the small and subtle clues that, when I’m in the full flight of certainty about what I’m doing and where I’m going, I may rush past. Robert Frost may well be right when he suggests that there are only middles – although for me though the middles are, increasingly, a “tangle” of beginnings and ends. I can identify with Chapin’s words as he talks of “no clearcut beginnings”, roads with “bends” and “no dead ends”.

Most importantly this speaks to me of mostly being in the midst of things and having to do whatever figuring out is needed from within those immediate circumstances.

In a paper delivered in 2000 and later published in Concepts and Transformations, John Shotter proposed two “ways” that I think might help us express “the fleeting presence of new possibilities”. He talked about being “primordial enough (in one’s stance)” and “original enough (in one’s words)”.  I take being “primordial enough” to mean that we can be more aware of and “listen” to the bodily nature of our responses as a clue, before we begin to overlay the response with the usual frameworks and concepts. I take being “original enough” in our words to mean that we can, from time to time, try out new ways of expressing the same ideas.

An exercise you can try anytime might be to

1. Notice your bodily responses – to be particularly aware of when you feel disturbed, angered, puzzled, upset, confused etc.
2. When this happens, to pay particular attention to the metaphors that are being used to express the point. It could be one you are making or one being made by another. It could even be the metaphors you are using in your conversation with yourself to try to “explain” what is happening.
3. Try re-expressing the same point using different metaphors. It doesn’t matter what different one’s you try – the point is not to be looking for a “better” use of language so much as to disturb the certainty of the current one.

Another, even harder, thing you can do is to articulate your “noticing” and engage others in experimenting with different metaphors. You might introduce the idea something like this: “I notice when we talk about X we almost always use words and phrases that describe it in terms of Y. I wonder what we could learn about our thinking on this if we tried out some different words and phrases.” This is hard (and feels very risky) but can often lead to great hilarity as people find more and more unusual ways to “describe” the completely familiar.

As always I would be very interested to hear about what happens if you try this out.

PS: Probably the best introduction to how metaphors are fundamental to the way we live is the pioneering work of Lakoff and Johnson in the book Metaphors We Live By in which they argue that metaphors are fundamentally conceptual in nature and grounded in everyday experience and that abstract thought is largely, although not entirely, metaphorical.

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“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which they have been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms them in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils their sense of reality, so that they are all too apt to take their concepts for data, their words for actual things.”
Aldous Huxley

Recently one of my long-term clients (I’ll call him Greg for the current purpose) was introduced to something called the skill-will matrix. He found it really useful as a trigger for shifting the way he was thinking about and acting in relation to the “performance” of a number of members of his team.

As far as I know the original idea for this comes from a simple and very practical book on coaching by Max Landsberg called The Tao of Coaching. Landsberg uses it as a “rule of thumb” way that coaches (or managers) might decide what style of coaching might be most useful and effective in a given circumstance. My client found it useful as a “reminder” of something that was in plain view for him. That not everybody is the same and that, therefore, as a manager with a strong desire to support his team into a happy and productive relationship with their work and each other, he needs to respond differently to different people and in different circumstances.

Greg pointed  to me that it is possible to identify people who, at least for the purpose of thinking about their work and what to do to support them, clearly fit into one of the elements of the matrix. He observed, however, that most people probably occupy a “space” in the middle of the matrix, “bumping around” if you like, among the elements. “Will” is not a mono-dimensional thing.  Neither is “skill”. Each of them is what it is in relation to a uniquely particular time and context.

This leads me to think about the “maps” we have that help us navigate our way around the complexities of leading, managing and organising. We have many of them and most can act as “reminders” of some aspect of our experience and can be useful to direct us back to a particular circumstance. None of them “represent” reality. The world we are part of is much “messier” than any model. Nonetheless many of these “maps” are useful reminders and can draw our attention to aspects of our experience that we might otherwise miss. The risk is only if we begin to take them as “descriptive” of reality, if we act as if the world as we experience it actually consists of matrices and checklists and the like.

That’s why I particularly liked the subtlety of Greg’s variation on the skill-will matrix. It “reminds” me that it is our engagement within our immediate experience of working together with others that is most significant in forming the way forward. The complex experiences that we conveniently “label” as skill and will inevitably wax and wane. Often, as we “bump around” in the metaphorical box at the centre of the matrix, we do so without noticing. Our feeling of being more or less “skilled” or more or less “willed” in relation to particular work or a particular person or group influences the way we respond in real time without our necessarily becoming aware. As so much of how we “go on together” depends on the way we relate and respond to each other, becoming more aware as we “bump around” in the centre of the matrix could be one way in which the pattern of that relating and responding might become different.

If we are to become more “aware” in the moment, though, it will not be by thinking about the matrix or by conscious effort. It will be by being more attune to our “feelings” – the bodily emotional and ethical responses that are, even if only momentarily, prior to conscious thought.

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