Social Poetics

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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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Image by Jackie Kever via Flickr

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.“ – Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)

This is the first of a number of emails I intend to write to record my exploration of the notion of social poetics, a topic I introduced last week. The first of the “methods” I mentioned was the concept of ”arresting moments“. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Shotter and Katz suggest that there are, ”hidden in plain view“, moments in the flow of our conversational relating which ”remind“ us of things that we have long since taken for granted. The trick is to notice them.

I’ll try to illustrate what I think they mean with a personal story.

Last week I had a conversation with Theodore Taptiklis, founder of the Storymaker Research Institute and author of the book Unmanaging: Opening Up the Organization to its Own Unspoken Knowledge. We discussed various bits of work we are each doing with public sector clients and generally engaged in a ”flowing“ conversation about our work and our practices. Towards the end of our conversation Theodore suggested that I and another colleague we both know are ”self-taught“ in relation to our practice. Out of the ”flow“ of the conversation we had this really struck me and seems to have triggered what I can only describe as a cascade of memories, associations and thoughts.

As I write these I am sure it will sound more organised and intentional than it actually was/is and more finalised than it feels at the moment. To try to convey something of the disjointedness I will describe things in bold. Where I think I am editorialising or interpreting, rather than attempting to capture the experience, I will use italics.

I was ”struck“, but the idea of being self taught didn’t grate – it just wasn’t a description I would have used about myself. After all I have benefitted from a good deal of formal education.

Up until recently I think I would have grabbed hold of this and tried to, metaphorically, wrestle it to the ground. I would also have been very concerned to try to find out what Theodore ”really“ meant. This time I was more interested in my own response and have a sense of being content to let my response happen and see where it led/leads.

For a good deal of my working life, I have ended up in situations or roles in which a way to operate and the practices that would work needed to be ”improvised“. It seems to me it has often been the case that I have worked intuitively and then ”made sense“, in a more theoretical way of how and why certain things worked, retrospectively.

At one point in our conversation Theodore talked about some work he had done with social workers trying to ”capture“ their professional knowledge. He offered the view that for him what they brought and applied to their work was their experience of life. Life, of course, including their work. This also ”struck“ me, although more slowly, and probably only as a result of sitting with the idea of being self-taught.

My high school Ancient History teacher insisted that we start from an examination of the sources, the earliest evidence, and only later introduced the interpretation applied by various historians in textbooks.

My early exposure to the work of Garth Boomer, who wrote a little book called Negotiating the Curriculum, is also significant. Unfortunately I never got to meet Garth, but I was heavily influenced by the ideas in the book and began experimenting with approaches that I would now describe as ”dialogical“.

I don’t think I had ever really considered how influential these two experiences have been in the way I have worked and the practices I have adopted and continue to try to refine. The idea that we can really only begin where we are and with what we know and the idea of somehow going back to the source have really been quite powerful for me. It is also possible that much of my recent reading and conversation with people like Theodore have re-ignited these influences.

I read a lot – but often castigate myself because I don’t finish things, or I feel like I’ve got the gist, put it away and then maybe come back to it later when something triggers a need or re-kindles my interest.

I have a much stronger sense of my reading not as a form of study but as an ongoing conversation with a community of people who had/have something to say that I want to hear. Even as I’m writing this I am struck by how powerful, but how unnoticed, the idea that one only reads for a purpose, has been for me. It hasn’t stopped me from following my nose all over the place but it has been a background theme I think that has coloured my perception of the value of what I am doing.

Hopefully this is enough for you to get the flavour or impression of what I experienced.

Three things seem worth mentioning now that I have taken the step of trying to write this down:

1. It seems that sometimes my learned tendency to want to theorise things can get in the way of noticing the experience of my own shifts of thinking and the connections and reconnections I am making.
2. Almost everything I’ve recorded here had its genesis as an imagined conversation – perhaps with Theodore, or John Shotter and certainly with you. Nothing began the instant I sat down to write.
3. But, of course, the very act of writing, although it has corralled it a bit, hasn’t stopped the ongoing flow of thought. In fact it has ”set it off“ again.

So … in the spirit of conversation, I would be really interested to hear your response to this or for you to share a story about an arresting moment that occurs for you in the next few weeks. I’ll leave you with a quote from John Kennedy.

”When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.“
John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963), Amherst College, Honoring Robert Frost

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