On Living, Leading, (Re)designing, and Coaching

A tectonic shift in the landscape of trust

What is happening in the world today? I believe that, among many things, there is a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust.

Historically, we have placed our trust in authorities - politicians, business leaders, spiritual leaders and leaders in the scientific community. We have an unflagging trust in rationality. And we are living in challenging times amidst global recession, climate change, loss of jobs, pandemics, terrorism, war, etc. These are times of crisis. And in the midst of these crises our trust is being shaken. What can we trust? Whom can we trust?

When we feel our trust being shaken many of us are thrown into one of three different moods. We are either resigned that things aren't going well and they will turn out however they do. We are resigned to that and there is nothing we can do. Or we are resentful. We get angry with those in positions of authority in which we placed our trust. We are angry with them for their limitations (e.g., not being in control of things) and angry with them for their abuses of power and their violation of our trust. Or we deny that what is happening both locally and globally has any impact on our lives. We say to ourselves, "It doesn't matter, I'm going to live a fine life anyway." Those of us in denial are living in the misguided notion that it is  possible to live in a bubble detached from the impact of what's occurring around us.

Neither resignation, resentment, or denial are moods that compel us to invest in building a different future. Instead, they compel us to continue ceding power and trust to others.

We need to cultivate a different mood: hope. Obama brilliantly did this in his campaign. He stood for the possibility that the future can be better; that the abuses of trust and power can be overcome. He stood for the possibility that together we can design and build a lifestyle that works better for all.

Of course, there is a danger that we will again place our trust in Obama as the latest authority figure. And when he fails to deliver what we expect, then we will find ourselves being resentful, resigned, or in denial.

Each of us must take responsibility for cultivating hope and optimism in our own lives. Each of us must step forward ...  trust ourselves ... and be a leader in our own lives and the lives of our loved ones.

I think we are in the midst of a tectonic shift in the landscape of trust. From a historical perspective, this shift is more like an 8.0 earthquake. We are being called more and more deeply to find the part of ourselves that is not afraid and in which we can trust without question. We are being called to find our source of inner guidance, our source of true leadership and express that. In a significant way, this shift is a call for a kind of collective spiritual awakening.

I'm not saying that this earthquake will do away with political leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders, or scientific leaders. They will still exist and we will still need to trust them for their expertise, their unique viewpoint, and their positions of empowerment to affect certain actions.  However, in the future we will not cede all of our trust to them so blindly and excuse ourselves from the table. Instead, we will take our place within the conversation, within the collaboration, within the decision-making and the action.

Already today we see patients taking their medical care more fully into their own hands. Patients are researching options for addressing their medical concerns on the web so that they can more fully participate in the conversation and decision-making with their physicians.

Given what has happened in the financial services sector, I imagine that more transparency (and regulation) is just around the corner. This transparency will be demanded of people like you and me who, trusting more fully in themselves, seek to enter the conversation with their banks and financial advisors in a more consciously empowered way.

Hope compels us to take responsibility for the way things are and step forward to build things anew in a spirit of collaboration and community. However, we can't wait for hope to arise before we take action. In fact, it is in taking action to build a future that works better that we evoke hope in ourselves and others. This is a great act of Self-leadership and if we quiet ourselves enough we all hear the call to take this step forward.

No action is too small. You can do more with what you have than you think. The end of these crises will not, in my opinion, leave us back where we were before they started. That life and lifestyle is gone. This earthquake will leave the landscape of trust permanently and fundamentally changed. We will need to find new paths, new approaches, new collaborations, new communities in order to survive and flourish both locally and globally. We will be living in a new world. And, in a very real way, we already are. Day by day more of us awaken to the realization that we are already in a new world.

In this new world new capabilities and skills will be needed to survive and flourish. Today I can see at least three broad capabilities that everyone will need.

1. Self-leadership - everyone will need to be a leader in their own life. Everyone will need to learn to trust themselves and to face into life's challenges as true leaders do - simultaneously in contact with their fears but also able to bring forth a constructive response from the depth of their capacity, their resourcefulness, and their creativity. In this new world, spectators won't last very long.
2. Entrepreneurship - everyone will need to see and respond to the world the way an entrepreneur does. They will need to see emerging unmet needs and re-vision and re-fashion themselves and their collaborators and communities in ways that offer to fulfill those needs.
3. Self-education - everyone must learn how to learn. Change is occurring at an ever increasing rate. Novelty is winning by leaps and bounds. Those that cling to "the way things have been" will stop being competitive. In fact, the ability to learn and develop yourself, your organization, and your community faster and more powerfully will become the primary competitive advantage.

The world that we are awakening into is the world of the "compassion worker." Many years ago noted management theorist Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and heralded that knowledge work will be the primary unit of production in the coming age.  Well, the coming age came and went. Of course, I'm not saying that knowledge work will disappear just as Drucker wasn't saying that industrial labor would disappear.

What I'm saying is that knowledge work has to grow up and mature. And that will and is happening as more and more deeply care is being brought into the mission and structure of work. Riane Eisler has a new book that looks to speak to this (I haven't read it yet but it is on the stack :-) called The Real Wealth of Nations. According to the blurb she proposes a reinvention of economics in which caregiving is central. And, most curiously, she propses this as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.

So the world as I see it will be filled with entrepreneurial leaders who see their primary business as caregiving of some kind and who are able to learn and adapt to emerging unmet needs and invent new possibilities to fulfill them. Pehaps this is just my dream, my hope. It may be, but this is the world that I am personally investing myself in building.

Love,

-Steve

Changing the Way We Change

This past weekend I picked up the published version of Charles Leadbeater's book "We Think".  I've been tracking this project since he published the full manuscript in draft form in 2006 for public editing - a bold and courageous move for an author.

Here is a short video summarizing the major points of the book produced by Charles.

So here is my take about what is happening - we are changing the way we change and this has a direct impact on how our identities are constructed, how people trust us, how people value us, and how well we are able to generate value for others.

And ... people and organizations that don't change the way they change will start dropping like flies. Well, that's a bit extreme. For sure that will happen to some in markets where competitiveness depends on sensitivity to fast-changing customer needs and wants.

Why do I think this will happen? Because what was previously through impossible - changing practices en mass on a global scale in a short period of time - is now possible. And the time period is growing ever shorter as the years go on.

All of this is being fueled by new social technologies - internet, wikis, facebook, myspace, linkedin, google, etc. - but is actually an expression of a new way of being, a new way of relating, and a new way of changing.

And, I might add, this new capacity for change is arising just in the nick of time to resolve the massive breakdowns in sustainability that we have on this planet.  Those breakdowns will not be resolved through management decisions or legislation - although both will play key roles. Instead, they will be resolved by "us" working together collaboratively.

And it seems to me that the challenge in moving forward with this is that whenever anybody says something like I just said - that we must work together collaboratively on a global scale - we see this as without any real traction and without any substantial ownership.  Somehow the idea seems overly idealistic from the perspective we currently have.

And yet if you've read Paul Hawken's latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World you'll see evidence of "we think" in action. This isn't an ideal, it is a reality!  Here's a Paul Hawken talking about this to some Googlers.

Enjoy!

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability includes an I-thou

Yesterday I posed the question "What is the body of sustainability?" I proposed one notion, the body of sustainability has our minds and bodies be integrated not separated.  And I pointed to many of the problems that such a separation brings forth.

Today, I want to explore the separation between each other. Here I'm going to use Martin Buber's lingo.  Buber recognizes that we can have I-it relationships where I, as a self, relate to you, as an thing.

From this I-it relationships we get all kinds of social injustices, wars, and abuses. We treat each other on the basis of our differences - how different can a self be from a thing, after all - and not on the basis of our sameness. The enemy feels fear and wants to protect their children's future too.  I know I'm oversimplifying things here.  But I'm not trying to make subtle distinctions about war.

The alternative to I-it relationships is I-thou relationships wherein I as a self relate to you as a self - as another human being with the same legitimacy as I have.  This is the foundation of true contact, true relationship, and true love. I'm proposing that the body of sustainability is an I-thou body.

In a comment to my post yesterday, Lisa Christie brought forth Riane Eisler's distinction of dominator relationships and partnerships.  To me, the very basis of a dominator relationship is an I-it relationship. I-it is the foundation of slavery, abuse, and dictatorship.

As the unsustainability of our way of life becomes more acute, how will we respond to our fears that will naturally arise?  Will we defend ourselves through domination?  There are many who see this as the only viable alternative.  It certainly seems like the oil-grabs that are in progress throughout the world express this response. Surely we must find ways of being with each other in facing the crisis of sustainability instead of over each other. Can partnership be a more creative, more productive, and more effective protection of our children's future?  I say YES.

Buber's I-thou is the heart of true contact with one another and therefore at the heart of partnership.  However, we can't truly contact another if we are not first in contact with ourselves.  For me, this is where integration of self and body meet integration of I and thou. Being in contact with ourselves means that we don't have our bodies as objects that we posses and that we don't have ourselves as disembodied beings. Being in contact with ourselves is being an embodied self. And it is out very bodyhood, as Medard Boss pointed out (with echoes of Martin Heidegger in the background), that brings forth our coexistence in a shared world with others. In being in contact with ourselves true contact with each other becomes a reality.

So in healing the I-it wound with I-thou contact we again return to the body - the body of sustainability.

Thanks to those who have responded to my invitation to engage this question.

Take care,

-Steve

The Body of Sustainability

This past weekend I launched a new graduate level Integral Coaching course at New Ventures West called Deepening the Somatic Stream. In Integral Coaching, we recognize that people develop in different ways. We call these ways "streams of development" adopting Ken Wilber's lingo.  The streams of development we work with are somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, spiritual, and integrating.  This course is on deepening development in the somatic stream.

I posed a question to the group as a project over the 5-month duration of the course.  The question is ...

What is the body of sustainability?

Here's my premise ... and I need to start waaay back at the beginning.

When we were born, each of us was born (dare I say thrown) into a cultural narrative not of our own design or choosing. As we grew up in our family, we began to learn and embody our culture.  We learned how to speak the language, how to attend to customs, how to behave, how to relate to others, what is forbidden, what is valuable, etc. We learned how to be a Jewish-American from New York or an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania or a Native American from New Mexico or whatever. And we learned this as simply who we are - as a way of being.

And our way of being is self-sealing. What I mean by this is that the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.  And the world we live in brings forth who we are.  Have you ever talked to a fundamentalist and realized how their worldview has lots of self-consistency.  And anything that doesn't fit, they reject in order to maintain the self-consistency of their worldview.  Well, that's the way we hold worldviews even if we aren't fundamentalist.

Here's the key part of this. In the beginning we didn't have a narrative. Then as we lived and interacted with first our parents and siblings, and then others in our extended family and neighbors and friends and teachers, we embodied a narrative. I say embodied a narrative because that's how it works.  Our culture lives in our bodies. And we express our culture through our speech and behavior and relationships. We express our culture through our actions. And if there are little tikes around, they pick up the culture from us and embody it themselves. This isn't something that we were conscious of, it simply occurs.  This is one of the wonderful inventions of "who knows what or whom" that has supported our evolution thus far.

But our future evolution isn't something that we can take for granted. Today we find ourselves in a "wicked mess" of crises. In this post, I'm going to focus on our sustainability crisis. 

The way we are currently living isn't sustainable.  I'm not going to ground this assessment here. Others have and can do a much better job of that than I can.  But let me say that this is an assessment that I accept.

So where did our unsustainable way of living come from?  Well, I hate to point fingers but it came from our parents and grandparents and the culture that they embodied and passed onto us. We (and by we here I am mainly talking about the Western world) have an unsustainable culture. And it lives in our bodies and is expressed, reinforced, and passed onto our little tikes through our actions.  In short, we have a body of unsustainability. As as the rest of the world (such as China and India and perhaps some day Africa) adopts our Western ways in order to become competitive and stake their own claims on prosperity we in the Western world are getting to see the unsustainability of our ways in stark relief.

So it seems to me a natural question to ask what is a body of sustainability? And how does one go about building one? And how to you "undo" the body of unsustainability?

These are big questions but maybe y'all would like to join me and my students over the next five months in being with these questions.

Disembodied Selves Leads to Over-consumption

Here's a starting place ... from my observation, the very heart of our unsustainable culture is the interpretation that we are separate from our bodies. And because we are separate from our bodies we abuse our bodies. We overeat, we work 80-hour workweeks, and we pop sleeping pills so we get enough rest to keep pushing ourselves. If we do pay attention to our bodies it is some sort of home improvement project like building a six pack or liposuction.  I saw a brochure for a spa the other day in my local organic grocery store that advertised "body management" services. It is as if our bodies are unruly and need to be disciplined.

In the West we have antipathy for our bodies thanks to Calvin and St. Augustine who had difficulties with their own bodies and their own sexuality. We blame our bodies for being sick, for being too weak, for not looking good enough, for falling in love with the wrong people, for being addicted, for being clumsy.  It is as if we didn't get the life we wanted because of the body we have.  We have our bodies like a cage we live in. It is no wonder that we seem to either deny our embodied life or try to take it on as a home improvement project.

This split between ourselves and our bodies creates a disembodied sense of self, lack of true contact with others, detachment from the world, disintegration of our life, meaninglessness, resignation, stagnation, and suffering. In short, our lives seem deficient and empty in some essential way.  It is as if there is a giant abyss in the middle of our lives that we must fill in order to bring significance and fulfillment to our lives. So what do we throw into the abyss to fill it up?  We throw in new cars, iPhones, fancy food, fast food, lots of sex, new shoes, alcohol and other state altering substances, etc. This abyss that's smack in the middle of our lives isn't really a secret. Marketers know all about this and use it as leverage to sell us the latest stuff. But in all these years of consumption, how many of us have managed to fill the abyss? No one.

So my first notion of the body of sustainability is a healing of this split between ourselves and our bodies. As human beings we are embodied beings. We are not disembodied selves in possession of a body. We are bodied selves. And perhaps in this recognition comes the true resolution of the deficiency we feel. Perhaps it is not new cars and phones and other consumables that we need to fill the abyss but it is ourselves, our conscious bodies, that will fill the abyss from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

In her book Getting Our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell makes the point that addiction is dissociation from our body. This seems right to me. And as a culture we are addicted to eating, drinking, sugar, oil, and shopping malls.  What if our bodies really don't need all that? If we were integral with our bodies instead of dissociated from them, would our way of living be more sustainable?  I believe the answer is a definite YES. 

Earlier I pointed to how our worldviews are self-sealing. It often takes a big breakdown or crisis in order to break the seal. And when such a break happens, we can either choose to re-examine our cherished beliefs about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our world and develop a new worldview that resolves the breakdown ... or we can ignore the breakdown and pretend things are business as usual.  So here we are, on the precipice of a planet-wide breakdown. What will we do?

So this is my first notion of building a body of sustainability - heal the split between ourselves and our bodies. We haven't looked at the separation from each other and from the planet. For sure they have a big role to play here too. More on that later.

So ... please help me distinguish the body of unsustainability from the body of sustainability. What new interpretations are needed? What interpretations do we need to drop?  What new practices are needed? What old practices do we need to stop?

Take care,

-Steve

Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community

Good morning,

Last week I summarized a paper that I recently read by Peter Block. I have received permission to share it with you.  Enjoy!

Download CivicEngagement.pdf

If you have any comments on this, I'd love to hear them.

Love,

-Steve

Restoration of Community Through Civic Engagement

Two postings ago I pointed to three big breakdowns that I believe all leaders must face in today's political and business climate. Today I'll explore the second breakdown - the fragmentation of community.

Our conversations today are often generated within narratives and beliefs about each other that fragment us:

• If you're not with us, you're against us.
• If you aren't one of us, then you are one of them.
• I need to take care of my own.
• I need make you wrong in order to make me right.
• I need to dominate you in order not to be dominated.
• I need to make you invalid in order to validate myself.
• I need to make you guilty in order to secure my innocence.
• I need to burden you in order to relieve myself.

These narratives and beliefs drive much of how we relate to each other and how we build community. They all seem to be strategies for survival. But how well do they ensure our survival in the long run?

Underlying all of these narratives is the belief that war - which these are all forms of - ensures our survival. And in a way it did when our problems of survival were localized. But today we have global sized threats to our survival - both economic and environmental.

Today, perhaps as never before in our history we are being presented with global threats that demand global responses. The narratives and divide us, that fragment us as a community, only make our survival less possible. What is called for is a reconstruction of community.

Right now I'm in the middle of attending my first virtual conference GOS2006 - Global Open Space Conference.

The first speaker is Peter Block, author of several bestsellers on leadership, management, and business consulting. He has given us all a paper called "Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community" to read and discuss with him during the conference.

In it he characterizes our current ways of living together as retributive.  Retributive is a good way, I think, of characterizing the narratives/beliefs above. And retributive conversations are devoid of accountability and soft on commitment.

He proposes a conversational reconstruction of community as follows:

1. Conversation for Invitation - conversations which extend invitations; being in a community must be a choice not a mandate
2. Conversation for Possibility - conversations which declare new possibilities for the future that are available through civic action within a community
3. Conversation for Ownership - conversations in which we establish ourselves as the cause of the community; where accountability is declared
4. Conversation for Dissent - conversations in which people can say "no" are essential if there "yes" is to be meaningful
5. Conversation for Commitment - conversations in which promises are made to generate satisfaction within the whole community
6. Conversation for Gifts - conversations focused on the gifts we bring and offer to the community

These conversations of civic engagement are an approach to reinventing our communities in a way that generates accountability, commitment, and not fragmentation.

I'll ask him if I can distribute the paper on this blog. Stay tuned for more.

What approaches to community building should also be in this conversation?

-Steve