Disturbing certainty and coherence

“Any new energy coming into a system causes turbulence.”
Dede Osborn

This week I want to take up the question:

How do we disturb certainty and coherence compassionately?

What are the options when you can see, or at least suspect, that the certainty and coherence of a particular point of view or approach may not be the whole story or may even be misguided? What do you do when your values and beliefs, perhaps even your sense of identity, are challenged by the people you work with and the very organisation that you are part of and whose cause you believe in?

On the weekend we went with our children, who were marching with their school, to our local ANZAC Day march and ceremony. As a baby-boomer from the Vietnam era listening to the speakers at the ceremony vividly recalled for me many moments as a young history teacher standing at the back of a school assembly aghast at what was being said. Last Saturday I was struck in quite a different way.

My attention was caught first by the reading of an Archibald McLeish poem, The Young Dead Soldiers. The two lines that kept ringing out for me were these:

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

For me this is so, not just about the deaths of young soldiers in war, but of so much else. I can equally say “My words are not mine; they are yours; they will mean what you make of them.”

Later in the ceremony my friend and colleague, Richard Kelloway, a former air force officer, gave the address. He made reference to the well know statement by Thomas Jefferson that, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Richard suggested that what we must be vigilant for comes in many forms. Not just an aggressive enemy but also the more subtle forces of intolerance, rigidity, apathy and cynicism to name a few. Perhaps too, one of the things we must be vigilant for is too much certainty and coherence. Thinking too much that things must be ordered and controlled.

If we are vigilant and our alarm bells go off what are our options? What can we do? How can we do it compassionately?

Co-incidentally I have just begun re-reading Debra Meyerson’s book Tempered Radicals which has recently been re-published (with an up-dated introduction but otherwise without revision) as Rocking the Boat: How To Effect Change Without Making Trouble. The book is the result of extensive interviews with people from within three organisations who found themselves acting “… on identities and values that are different from the majority culture, [that] disrupt and implicitly challenge normal ways of acting and thinking by making visible alternatives”. Drawing on the work of Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams she describes a number of “responsive turns adopted by her interviewees in the middle ground betwee silence and confrontation.

• Interrupting an encounter to change its momentum.
• Naming an encounter to make its nature and consequences more transparent.
• Correcting an encounter to provide an explanation for what is taking place and to alter understandings and challenge assumptions.
• Diverting an encounter to take it in a different direction.
• Using humour to release the tension in a situation.
• Delaying in order to find a better time and place to address the issue.

All of these, of course, presuppose that we can be sufficiently mindful, in the moment, to recognise that we have a choice, and to chose wisely.

For a powerful artistic reminder of the power of some of these tactics I can’t think of anything better than the classic movie, Twelve Angry Men.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore’s blog for the reference to this particular scene.

Each time you or I put one of these options into practice we undoubtedly bring a different “energy” into the patterns of conversation that enable and constrain our worlds.