The Settle
April 18, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
My business is change facilitation and my sport is rowing. I’ve learned a lot about both from cox’ns who provide the inspiration for this 4th in a series of four posts about change leadership using social business initiatives as an example.
The first 3 posts were about:
- Shifting the vantage point through willingness, not willfulness.
- Releasing the fairy tale and attendant story-lines identified with what’s non-integral and non-sustainable.
- Creating the conditions in which innovation and productive friction can take place by embracing different perspectives and individual lenses on the new direction.
This post is about execution and action which require one of the most important parts of a race or practice that the cox calls: the settle. A lot of business leaders get this wrong. They launch a new project with a racing start and push everyone to hold that pace indefinitely. But its the settle that results in purposeful attention, high quality and finding the optimal rhythm together. Just like in the racing shell.
Like cox’ns, business leaders facilitate the shift from urgent desire to unity and trust, through giving the right feedback at the right time. Doing so requires a multi-dimensional awareness, what you and your team sense, feel, believe and embody..not just what you know or want.
The settle can’t be confused with settling for less because its a moment by moment refusal to be less, especially when it hurts. It must be understood as the collective action that creates shared responsibility for aligning with the desired results. In social business, those desired results are some form of creating natural influence in your communities and networks and with your audience.
If you lead like a cox’n, that natural influence could show up as gold.
Embodied Resentment
December 1, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Graphic credit: ©2008-2009 ~smoweeks via DeviantArt
When I work with people to help them better respond to change, I find there’s zero tolerance or willingness to examine old, embodied resentments and the problems they cause. I’ve learned to distinguish these from the usual, garden-variety resentments, the lingering, angry thoughts and feelings about people or unwanted experiences that provoke, harm or result in suffering. Resentful thought forms that impede personal, professional and organizational growth and development, can be resolved when people are willing to separate and examine facts, thinking and feelings.
Embodied resentments are older, even ancient and always subconscious. They seem to come out of nowhere. You can just be driving along in the sunshine and listening to your favorite music and suddenly you realize that you’ve been fixated for an hour on some old grudge that you were sure you were finished with long ago. You find yourself in a moody funk darkened by obsessive negative thinking, anxiety and a sense of hopelessness. We all know what it feels like to be in the “grip” of the black heart and what it feels like to be around others in its grasp. Its not hard to envision the impact on organizational culture when embodied, contagious resentments surface and get fueled by the rumor and gossip mill.
The desire, of course, is to stop or at least alleviate the accompanying suffering. The challenge is knowing how to work with our own and others’ resentments that are deeply hidden from awareness. When the memories and beliefs are blocked from your mind yet embodied in your cells, how can you examine what you don’t know you know? We’re taught about the pitfalls of the default responses like resistance, denial, distraction, avoidance, numbing and pretense. Those pitfalls include prolonging and intensifying the suffering and contaminating others by projecting it onto, and acting it out against, people you live or work with.
A better response is a friendly curiosity about embodied resentment: where does it come from, when does it show up and what does it want of us? It may be showing up on an anniversary or holiday, or at a place we’ve been before, or in a challenging circumstance similar to a past one we’ve already experienced. Like a disturbing dream, disturbing resentment can be a pointer to something we need to learn to keep moving forward and evolving; or it can be a lead to help us solve a seemingly intractable problem or help us make a seemingly impossible personal or business decision.
It may seem like a stretch that the grip of the black heart and its attendant misery and suffering is a good thing. If so, it may be valuable to at least be willing to accept that its a helluva effective way to stop us and get our attention. What we do with it is our choice.
Discernment – Its An Honor
October 18, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Discernment: The “D” in DRIVE
One of the 5 requisites of the RedShift DRIVE Self-Awareness and Change Leadership Model, and key to shifting identity in the meta-cognitive dimension, is Discernment.
Question Knowledge
Our default response is to form opinions and make personal, professional and business decisions based upon what we know: what’s worked or failed in the past, what we’ve read, heard, learned and been advised about by experts. What’s still often ignored is a sense response to subtle yet profound shifts and getting at “what we don’t know we don’t know” or “what we know but don’t know we know”.
I recently observed an example in a growing company in crisis due to lack of available financing in the current credit crunch. The management team’s opinion was that securing venture financing was the only way to survive. The founder/CEO wanted to hang on and self-fund in spite of looming insolvency rather than give up control and ownership. Months of endless meetings, opinions and arguments led to deadlock because there was no framework for knowledge awareness. Both sides were totally convinced of and attached to the rightness of their respective knowledge so could not brainstorm any breakthrough short-term, or transformational long-term, ideas.
These kinds of scenarios are played out every day as individuals and organizations try to figure out “where do we, or I, go from here?” The answer doesn’t seem to be more knowledge and advice, but rather a facilitated process to uncover the logic and truth driving every opinion and to examine if those beliefs hold true or need to be changed or replaced. The prerequisite for questioning knowledge is the agreement to suspend judgment and will. Those who refuse to learn and practice these skills will become increasing ineffective in the decision making, problem solving and innovation process.
Trust Intuition
Here’s a new way to think about lead generation: make yourself a funnel for your intuitive leads, pay attention and act on them without hesitation. As metaphysician Florence Scovel Shinn taught “Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.” To better discern among myriad choices, change responses and scenarios why not just ask for leads from a higher intelligence that’s always available and take it from there?
Honor Creative Power
Although we emphasize it more, we still tend to think about creative in terms of talent and visible output where team stars rise to the top and good managers find, cultivate and retain the stars for competitive advantage. That’s how organizations and teams succeed. But is it the only way to discern success?
I was recently part of a team of 8 women who got together to row in the Head of the Charles in a very competitive event. We had less than a month to organize and practice a few times but it quickly became apparent that there was a special dynamic among us. It was about more than appreciation for each others’ experience, talent, commitment and training. There was no “rah rah” about what we could achieve and there was no resentment about problems that came up or a result that was disappointing. It was bigger than any of that. It was about honoring our power to create an experience that served our greater selves. It seemed to arise naturally out of appreciation and gratitude for each other, the sport, the river, the rowing community and beyond.
Discernment is about what to yes to and what to say no. These decisions are shaped by our expectations about the (usually quantifiable) results we want from ourselves or our team. Self-aware teams will achieve so much more through honoring their creative power and achieving the possibly immeasurable result of natural influence.
I Coulda Been An Intender
September 11, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
The prevailing sentiment in response to massive change shifts we’re experiencing reminds me of the great scene from On The Waterfront.
The main character, Terry Mallow, played by Marlon Brando, is a dockworker mixed up in waterfront crime. He’s also a washed up fighter who, on his brother Charley’s instructions, threw a fight he could’ve won, to rig the odds for the mob/union boss. Later, Terry considers risking his life to testify against the mob, and his brother Charley tries to bribe and then threaten him about that choice. The famous scene plays out when Terry reminds his brother, that if he’d looked out for him and not pushed him to fix the fight “I coulda been a contender” and not just a bum with a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
What we get now, in similarly challenging times, is pressure to contend, that is, to struggle, strive and compete for and against people, things and situations. For the contender, perceived failure or loss leads to regret, guilt, despair and rage. The media and those who give advice for a living, love it. We’re bombarded with information that suggest that to survive we must contend.
But its a failure response to change.
Giving oneself over to contending is a form of hubris that leads to more suffering when we delude ourselves that we can change things through our force of will or stop change through the force of our resistance. Change is life. When we refuse to contend we align with life, with the infinite outcome probabilities available in every moment and with a guiding force that Einstein described as a friendly universe that’s on our side.
We’re witnessing the pressure to contend in the public and political battle over health care reform. The issues got obfuscated by the judgments about President Obama’s bi-partisan response to the opposition. He was increasingly called weak and ineffective, by even his most ardent supporters. Yet he refused to contend and instead consistently intended unity. Wherever you stand on the issues, there’s no mistaking the power of a leader who speaks from his or her personal truth and integrity. That power came through in the president’s recent health care reform address.
Contend implies against; intend implies toward. Its not to say that to contend is a bad thing, but from a Buddhist perspective to not contend means less suffering.
Yet we can learn through suffering as the Marlon Brando character learned in the story. We always have access to our voice of truth, exemplified in the movie by Father Barry, played by Karl Malden. Despite Terry’s furious screaming “its none of your business”, the priest convinces Terry that he can avenge his brother’s murder through the truth in a courthouse, not by “firing lead into another man’s flesh”. In other words, don’t give them what they want. Don’t contend.
For too long now, we’ve been telling our true self and inner voice: its none of your business. But we had it backwards and we’re now beginning to see more clearly that its never been our business. I think Emerson was speaking of our hubris, and that we think we know more than Nature and she says to us, “So hot? my little Sir.”
More than ever, it takes vigilance, diligence and courage to refuse the temptation to contend. Going against the status quo can mean rejection and even retribution. But when they called Terry a rat, he responded that he’d been ratting on himself for years. When we stop doing that, we may find that Palookaville is not as bad as anticipated and a gateway to what we want, the equivalent, or something even better.
Morphing Concepts
July 16, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Concepts emerge, divide, converge and morph. SEO is a good example. At one point there were two distinct camps: the search engine optimization folks and the organic optimization folks. But now the distinction is blurred. Highly technically focused search engine businesses now evangelize organic content.
Content-marketing is another example. The convergence was faster. The concept was based on: make the content interesting, relevant, compelling, appealing and valuable to the reader, and people will find it, share it and want more from the producer. The cream will rise to the top. But now, companies are tightly connecting content with SEO tools, techniques and technologies. Tailor the content to what they know people search for, and sell the system to drive traffic.
Who knows what’s good or bad, right or wrong, or which way to go?
This makes life interesting for professional service firms. How do you differentiate and position your services when the needs, problems, solutions and competitors are shifting and morphing?
Think of it as the ultimate opportunity to be unique.
For example: I became aware at one point that people need help with “what they don’t know they don’t know” and really had a passion for that space. So over time, I developed a model based on that realization that’s helped guide my strategic and creative decisions and that’s resulted in solutions that clients value.
I suggest getting very clear on what’s always been important to you, what you stand for, what you have passion for, and what you’re enthusiastic about. Build your frameworks around those. Who knows, someday the next big concept could be yours.
Is Critical Reasoning Dead?
May 22, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I’m not surprised that the most inspiring essay I’ve read in years is written by a motorcycle repairman, who also happens to be a great writer and who has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. His essay contrasts the levels of critical reasoning, intuition, judgment, experience and metacognition in both the bike shop and in the think tank. The former wins hands down.
Although I’ve never been a mechanic I did work for a decade in the machine-tool industry, both as corporate controller and entrepreneur/start-up partner. But the industry was in decline so I got an MBA and a year later started my career as a knowledge professional, specifically a Web 1.0 strategy consultant. It didn’t take long for my elation to turn to disillusion.
I remember a conversation I’d had with one of our solution architects, which in Web 1.0 meant he could write a paragraph and include a diagram. I showed him a brochure from my former company that I’d co-founded, highlighting one of our portable, lathe-mounted superfinishing machines that we designed and manufactured. He smirked and remarked “boy, you’ve come a long way”. The web consulting company merged several times and was eventually absorbed by a larger Web 1.0 company which then went away several years later. I think my co-worker ended up in financial services. After a another short interactive strategy consulting position I became self-employed. The machine-tool company I’d co-founded was under-capitalized and it folded. I lost touch with my former partners but occasionally drive through the industrial park where we were once located.
Its been 10 years but reading the essay reminded me exactly how I felt when the people who made concepts disparaged the people who made capital equipment. I’m grateful that I still have the traces of grease and oil in my blood to be able to appreciate one of the writer’s examples of the kinds of crises that industrial workers and mechanical engineers experienced on an daily basis.
I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.
But what I most identified with in this essay, is author’s description of the “feel” of the knowledge work jobs he’d had and how most everything about management and process contradicted anyone’s ability to produce great, creative work in order to churn out banal, yet profit-maximizing, output. Perhaps I’m over-idealizing my former life, but I don’t remember that kind of creativity stultification in my machine-tool days. But I still cringe to remember how as Web 1.0 consolidated, management continually tightened the throttle on critical reasoning and creative ideas that didn’t fit with their formula. They hated it and I couldn’t live without it. So, like the writer, I got out, not by opening a motorcycle repair shop but by starting my own solo professional service firm. I’d had enough of a taste of “process management” as a Web 1.0 knowledge worker to realize that if I wanted to create and produce at and beyond the level of which I knew I was capable, I’d have to do it as an independent.
Yet like him, I can imagine the possibilities of a more entrepreneurial, post-crisis economy and some resurgence of industry, the trades and the artisans. And I have faith that there’s even a chance for new and better knowledge work as hierarchies flatten and social business models and technologies replace conformity, formula, centralization and control with collaboration, networks, sharing, ideas and critical reasoning. He eloquently describes how our quality of life depends on it.
Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.
Validation
May 15, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I do a lot of things but “change facilitator” is my preferred title. So I try to continually improve how I give feedback and support and to share what I’ve learned with others. One thing for sure, every situation is different.
Here’s a scenario that I’m very familiar with. Someone I know, or who I’m working with, or who I’m close to, has a great idea for a professional or creative practice. They talk about it a lot but most of their knowledge and expertise is locked up in their mind. I’ve seen this go on for months, sometimes years, and even into a decade of postponing developing even the most basic content that will bring the idea to life and provide a structural foundation.
Eventually, the industry and market they want to serve changes and other professionals, creatives or organizations start showing up to serve the same market with similar services. Inevitably, those announcements cause a great deal of frustration and disappointment expressed with some version of:
- That’s exactly what I’ve been saying for years but nobody listened.
- People who are known in the industry and who have the connections and credentials have the advantage.
- They have the research behind them to prove their value; I don’t.
I’ve heard many variations on the above themes, none of which hold any water because these are competent, intelligent, resourceful individuals. Clearly, there’s limiting beliefs at work. The problem is that, until there’s awareness of them, everything that happens, like in the above example, reinforces those expectations and results in another cycle of frustration and disappointment.
Often, coaches, consultants, friends and family think that the best way to help turn things around is through some version of cranking up the pressure: pushing for plans, goals, action and accountability. In my experience those approaches rarely help unless people are ready for them, and often make matters worse. Some advisers try to mitigate that risk by asking the client’s permission first. That’s not a bad thing but what if the client doesn’t know what he (or she) doesn’t know?
In my experience, even just asking for permission can feel like pressure and/or judgment, leading to even more resistance. Surely we’ve all experienced to some extent being on both sides of this scenario. Unfortunately our “good intentions” can override our memory of what we probably most needed at the time(s) when we were blocked or stuck: acceptance and validation.
Validation (Thesaurus: That which confirms) statements can suddenly snap someone out of their habitual, self-diminishing thinking. It turns things around for them, even for just a moment. It “clicks”. You know it when it happens if you’re 100% open to the person and listening to them from your heart. They don’t have to say much because you feel the change in their energy whether its face-to-face or over the phone.
So if someone you know or counsel, is discouraged about “missing the boat”, its a good opportunity to validate them: Isn’t it wonderful that the evidence is in… proving that this is the perfect place and time for your ideas and business to explode like a gamma ray burst! (In your own words and you have to believe in them too, of course, but you get the idea.)
Clearly, its not simple to determine whether the right, in-the-moment feedback and support is a call to action, acceptance and validation..or something else. Its not possible to get it right all the time. Someone recently described himself as a “motivational listener”. That’s a good place from which to try.
Recommended reading: anything by Florence Scovel-Shinn
Hide & Seek
March 10, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
My granddaughters loved to play hide and seek with me. I’d hear them crazily running from room to room, laughing and calling my name. Sometimes, when I’d have a great hiding spot, and they couldn’t find me, their footsteps would get a little tentative and their voices more plaintive as they called for me. At that point I’d thump or knock on the floor or wall to let them know I was in the house. I’d hear them get very still and whisper until they could sense the direction of my clues. Then they’d get right back into their joy in the game, knowing they’d find who they were seeking, sometimes hidden right in front of them.
Have you been looking really hard for a long time for a new life direction? Have you been caught up in a cycle of excitement and anxiety? Try stopping, being very still and listening for the “knock knock” of your intuition (muse inner voice, guide, God – your call), trusting in it completely and willing to receive whatever jumps out of the hiding place.
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The RedShift Web Site Pages and the corresponding Blog: Creating Natural Influence, do not enable comments. I'm more comfortable getting feedback on social sites than here, where the work is so close to who I am, where I've been and where I'm going. If you have a comment or question, or would like to suggest a topic for an upcoming blog article, please contact me. Thank you.
