Social poetics: leading and managing from within the experience of joint action.

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“ What people most need to hear is inside them. It’s their own inner voice, based on their own experience, their own perception.”
Joanna Macy

“As we struggle with the tensions and interplay of my voice/your voice, my sense/your sense, what I am struck by/what you are struck by, infinite possibilities emerge.”
Ann Cunliffe

“For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
T. S. Eliot, East Coker, 1944

Last week my 11 year old daughter asked me, quite seriously, what I do for a job. I tried to explain by saying that I help people have meetings about things that are important to their work. When I said this she looked at me with a look that pretty much said, “… and you call that a job!”

Recently I started “coaching” a new client who said to me that she wasn’t interested in “waffly” conversations. What she wanted was to work out what needed to be done, develop a plan and then get on with doing it. After two sessions in which I think to the outside observer we just talked about what was going on in the particular situation she finds herself, she sent me an email just to confirm how helpful she was finding our work together. We have yet to make a plan, but we seem to have little difficulty knowing where we are headed and if we are making progress.

I have also begun noticing two things as I “facilitate” groups of people meeting and talking about things that are important to their work. Firstly, the situations and contexts in which people find themselves seem to me to be increasingly complex, paradoxical and unclear. The work is becoming much more about making some sense of where the group finds themselves and working out some next steps in a particular direction, than it is about making plans that will direct what people will do. Secondly, I have been experimenting with an increasing range of open-ended and “creative” approaches. People seem to thrive on them and make them their own in really interesting ways. Increasingly my “preparation” focuses much more on how the structure of the event itself will open enough space/time for conversation and dialogue  and on how to get conversations started – not on where the conversations might end up. Mostly we end up with “raw material” to stimulate further conversation.

All this has led me to reflect quite a bit about the sense I have that what I do, along with a number of my colleagues, doesn’t really fit under the conventional, everday understandings of coaching, facilitation or consulting.

In the last few days I have been reading John Shotter’s latest paper (available free online until end of September if you register) which he begins by describing an exchange between a consultant and a senior manager who has been given the task, in a large corporation, of building a new capability in the area of sales and marketing. He draws attention particularly to the situation in which this manager finds herself which he describes as being required to “… bring into existence, within the already existing organization, a new institutional structure, with a wholly different character to it than any already in existence.” He points out that while a degree of planning will be required, and will be helpful in describing what the overall task will look like prospectively, it is not likely to be particularly helpful in getting a sense of and assessing the specific openings, real possibilities and actual resources available as she takes steps, in joint action with others, along the way.

Shotter proposes that what might be more useful in this process of “finding our way about” and “going on together” (two phrases he uses a lot) is an unusual (and yet strangely familiar) collection of methods he and his colleague Arlene Katz have termed “social poetics”.  Here is a partial list of those “methods”.

• Paying attention to the “arresting moments” – the things that strike us as unusual or out of the ordinary in the everyday flow of relating and responding – thereby noticing and opening up the possibilities for novelty and change.
• Bringing words back to their everyday use and thereby bring ourselves back into the everyday situation from which our talk emerges rather than always operating from the theoretical and conceptual
• Using questions to call to mind and pay closer attention to the detailed use of words and their relationship to the concrete features and activities in the situation in the moment of their use rather than retrospectively.
• The continued use of particular examples as an antidote to our tendency to think and talk conceptually and cognitively and therefore “separate” our thinking and talking from our experience.
• The use of images, pictures and metaphors to help us open up new ways of talking and seeing and to sensitise us to alternative distinctions and relations that we may not otherwise see.
• Using comparisons to draw out other possible ways of talking, alternative perspectives and other options for action.

What struck me as I read through them, and particularly as I read Shotter’s discussion of the exchange between the consultant and the manager, was how much these ways of responding in coaching, facilitation and consulting contexts have become part of how I, and others I work with, operate. I’m not sure that this helps me to answer my daughter’s question, but it does help me to be clearer about what often comes to me rather intuitively. It also strikes me that these are often the things that leaders and managers do, or pick up on, in conversations that help people grasp more clearly where they are in a particular landscape of possibilities and action and open up new ways of thinking and therefore new avenues to “go on together”.

With this in mind I have begun two new projects:

1. I will be researching and writing more about these methods with a view to articulating them more effectively and to making the connections with much of the things we already do. You can follow online or sign up for my weekly email.
2. I will also be working on ways that I can engage leaders and managers in learning and exploring how these ways of working can contribute to their effectiveness in doing the work they need to do. If you are interested in hearing more about this or getting involved send me a message via the comments on this page.