Supporting public sector leaders and teams
Posts tagged Learning
Listening that creates us
May 11th
- Image by soylentgreen23 via Flickr
Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.
Ordway Tead
This week I’m heading into a number of “conversations”. In all of them a group of people will be thinking and talking about their work; what it is, what it means and how to organise themselves to get it done. As I think about how these conversations will go, I think about the multitude of theories about “good” conversations. Today this has led me to suggest what I think a “good” conversation might be. I ask myself, when I get to the end of the week and reflect on these conversations, individually and collectively what will I be looking for as a measure of success?
Not a bad question really. If any of them turn into a heated disagreement or a debate will that be good or bad? If they don’t go beyond being discussions, how will I judge that? What does it matter what I think of them anyway?
From my perspective there are two answers to my questions. Firstly, I will judge them to have been good conversations if, at the end of them, the people involved believe they have a better sense of where to go and what to do next? Secondly, my opinion of them will really only matter to me and I’ll be happy if I think that I have help at some stage of the conversation by drawing people’s attention to patterns in their talking and thinking that they may not have noticed otherwise. Of course, if noticing these patterns doesn’t help them to learn something new about how they relate and respond to each other about their work them it won’t matter much. But if it does them I will assume that I contributed to the possibility of learning and different action.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Alice Duer Miller
What really strikes me about my answers to my own questions is the extent to which I need to let go of any need or desire or perhaps expectation to “control” the conversations. As a “facilitator” this isn’t as easy as it might seem. Surely its my job to design and “conduct” or facilitate the conversations in such a way as to ensure a result. And yet my experience is that as soon as I start trying too hard to control I will inevitably fail to notice the very pattern that is most significant. I might notice it in the middle of the night after the conversation or, worse still, it may go unobserved.
My growing sense is that the listening that “creates us” and “makes us unfold and expand”, the listening in which “every sound comes back fuller and richer” sits very uncomfortably with attempts to control conversations.
I wonder if this is equally true for leaders who need to enable rich and purposeful conversation about “matters of common interest that have human importance”?
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A kind of an opening.
Apr 14th
- Image via Wikipedia
It seems to me that there might be another way of naming what we call fortune and attribute to the will or the whim of the gods. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course.
These lines are taken from Australian novelist David Malouf‘s latest book Ransom in which he “re-works” the story from Homer’s Illiad of the meeting between King Priam of Troy and Achilles. Previously Priam’s son, Prince Hector, had killed Achilles son Patroclus. In revenge, Achilles had in turn slaughtered Hector. Now Priam has come to beg for the return of Hector’s body.
Yet, when they meet, each is changed by seeing the meeting and each other through different eyes. Achilles sees in Priam an image of his own father. Priam sees, in Achilles, a vision of his dead son. They see, in the other, a reflection of their own past and perhaps a glimpse of their own future. And, of course, this changes what they do.
As I read these lines I began to reflect on just what it takes to grasp these moments of differing perception before they slip away. Several things strike me:
- Start exactly where you are. While every new story will have a beginning, middle and end when we look back with hindsight, it is rare for these to be obvious at the moment of insight. It’s a bit like writing now we have word processors. Perhaps the beginning, middle and end won’t actually happen in that order. But that doesn’t matter because we can “re-order” them.
- Go with you instinct. Just start doing what seems to be called for. In fact don’t just “trust” your intuition, however quietly it speaks to you. Obey it!
- Act first, then analyse. At this point too much thinking allows space for the voices of commonsense and conventional rationality to get in. The voice of doubt and rational advice can be very convincing if you give it time and space. At this point let action and your emotions guide you.
- Improvise first, craft second and systematise last. Once again it is a bit like writing. Just get something down/done first. Then go back and do the crafting, tweaking, correcting of the spelling etc. In the case of action don’t try to make sense of it too soon. It will be easier to make sense of what has happened when more has happened.
- Notice the incorporation or integration. It is astonishing how quickly, if you are truly on a new path that makes sense, a new way of seeing things and acting accordingly seems to fit with the ideas and practices that didn’t need to change.
- Watch out too for the consequential insights. Once you have seen one thing in a fresh way other things will also take on a different aspect. Heighten your awareness to these shifts as well.
I can’t resist finishing this piece with two of my favourite quotes, both from the French writer Marcel Proust.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
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Empathy as a form of learning
Mar 2nd
“We have work to do to make empathy an acceptable form of learning and knowing for people who are not poets and therapists. We have to make it possible for manufacturers and politicians to admit empathy as a legitimate, conscious discipline, thoughtful empathy as a form of knowing, leading to effective action.”
Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions
So what would it be like, this empathy as a form of learning and knowing? First it seems helpful to think about what we really mean when we used the word empathy. A look at www.dictionary.com reveals a multitude of definitions, each subtly different, but with the same two core senses:
- Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.
- The attribution of one’s own feelings to an object.
I am going to ignore the second sense for the moment and just explore the first. One thing that strikes me is that our sense of empathy often refers to situations in which the other person is troubled or experiencing some difficulty or crisis. There is a huge risk, it seems to me, with this narrower sense of empathising, that it with tip over into sympathy, or even worse, pity – rather than understanding. If I take this in the broader sense that I think Mary Catherine meant it, that I identify or understand in some way or other, and to a greater or lesser degree, the situation, feelings and motives of another person, two big questions arise for me:
- How do I know that I am empathising – and not just projecting my own view onto the other person?
- How does this help me to learn?
It seesm to me that a clue to both these questions might be that empathising isn’t exclusively an individualised or a cognitive process. It much more likely begins before “thinking” with a bodily response and be confirmed when, as I act in a particular way towards the person, they respond in a way that confirms my anticipation – the one that I think they will have if I have empathised.
So how does this, at least potentially, help me to learn? Well, if I experience enough of this “seeing the world” through the eyes of another, and my “seeing” is confirmed by their response it certainly opens up my sense of things to different perspectives.
I think Mary Catherine’s call is really quite important. What if we didn’t only do this when people were in trouble or when we felt an emotional response to how they were feeling and to their situation. What if there were a discipline that really sought to know more about and learn from the others and otherness that we experience each day, but which we so frequently ignore.
Something to do: If you find this idea intriguing, as I do, during this week, when you notice those moments that seem a little odd – experiment with responding to them in such a way that show you have some understanding, however small and see what response you get. My guess is it won’t work all the time but that you will be suprised at what you learn. Firstly about how much “oddness” there is around you when you set out to notice and secondly how much people crave to be understood at least partially (I figure that’s the best we can do!) in their own terms.
I would love to hear your comments and experiences if you have a go at this. Let’s start a bit of a conversation!
“Slow Epiphanies”
Feb 25th
Recently I came across the idea of “slow epiphanies”. At first it didn’t seem like much – an interesting contradiction in terms perhaps – but as I have reflected on the idea it is making more and more sense. I came across it in a piece on the various ways we learn. The suggestion was that sometimes our learning happens slowly and that it is by sticking to habits and practices that seem boring that this kind of learning slowly emerges. Not consciously at first but, perhaps, as a growing awareness that we are seeing and doing things differently.
As I thought about this it seems to me that there is some real sense in this. It has drawn my attention to the things I do that are more exploratory and that help me maintain an openness to new ideas and experiences. Here is a short list of things I have thought of that could be part of a process of “slow epiphany”.
- Journalling – writing regularly with an intent of simply recording what comes to mind.
- Reading in a general area with no goal in mind.
- Participating in a “community of practice”, whether formal or informal.
- Following interesting blogs – just listening to what people have to say, and paying attention to what captures their attention.
- Meta-conversations – talking about the way conversations you are engaged in happen. Once again not with a goal to have them conform more to a particular ideal but with interest and curiosity about what makes them tick.
- “Shooting the breeze”!
- Engaging in a practice (perhaps meditation) in which you notice the thoughts that come and go but don’t (as far as that is possible) engage with them or pursue them.
What strikes me about these activities is that they are largely based on a different kind of awareness or attention. Not so much goal oriented and therefore more narrowly focused as curiosity oriented and therefore much more broadly and less sharply focused.
So my simple questions are:
- What am I doing/what are you doing now to support this kind of learning?
- Is it enough?