The Transformative Power of Love
A few months ago, I was invited to participate to the kick-off meeting of a new business venture. We were six at the meeting and I was the only female. The five gentlemen were gifted individuals, exceptional entrepreneurs, each with an impressive track record for having founded one or more companies or for having held high-level positions in organizations. Not only were these men brilliant, they also had “big hearts” and were driven by a deep sense of purpose and a set of values based on doing “good” for society.
As we brainstormed about the purpose and other aspects of the business, the word “love” came out, again and again, as one of the driving principles for the new venture. The thing was, it wasn’t coming from me. For unclear reasons, I started to feel somewhat uneasy and my rational mind started to ramble with a story line that went something like this: “Love! Love! This is all nicely said, guys! But we are dealing with very complex business problems here. We need tools such as systems thinking to see connections and embrace the complexity and we need to build the skills, capacity, and expertise to address tough issues.”
I went on like this, talking to myself, not daring to express my feelings, as I did not want to “spoil,” or to bring to an end, the amazing flow of energy that was in the room. As the meeting proceeded, I became very confused. I also grew very unhappy with myself. Here I was, the only woman in the room, and I was the one who was not comfortable talking about love within a business context while these guys seemed to feel perfectly at ease with it. My feelings stayed with me well after the end of the meeting throughout the following days, until, eventually, they slowly dissolved.
I won’t expand on the personal development change I went through since that meeting but I know now, with much certainty, that these men were right and I did not get it! From a very deep place within myself I know that love is the absolute necessary ingredient at the basis of all transformative work. Without love at the root of our work, we—change agents—will not be able to build a sustainable future.
Love, compassion, and deep empathy for our clients, business partners, teammates, communities, as well as our family and friends must be the sources and driving energies for our transformative work. How could we bring consciousness in organizations without love? How could we facilitate adaptive change without compassion? How could we find solutions to our tough problems without empathy for the people involved in the process? We need love as the new transformative power to develop higher level of consciousness. We need love to create a generative field and awaken our collective wisdom. We need love because these are times when the most accomplished rational mind is helpless to find solutions—not because the solutions are beyond human intelligence (they are not!) but because innovative solutions require us to change our long-held mental models and values and to take a leap of faith into the unknown. We need love to believe in a world of possibilities, abundance, justice, equity, peace and harmony with the environment and with other living species.
In his most recent research and forthcoming book on “Getting Unstuck: Solving Tough Problems Through Power and Love,” Adam Kahane borrows from theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich to redefine power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity” and love as “the drive towards the unity of the separated.” As Kahane explains, power is the drive to achieve one’s purpose, to get one’s job done, and to grow, while love is the drive to reconnect and make whole that which has become or appears fragmented.
The redefinitions of these two fundamental forces of power and love—beyond their traditional meanings of “oppressive power” and “romantic love”—are very empowering when dealing with adaptive work. Every system, institution and living entity has a purpose (e.g., a school’s purpose is to educate and disseminate knowledge). Even when the purpose is not made explicit, it can be deducted from the behavior of the system (e.g., a school’s unstated purpose might be to have as many students as possible graduate each year). Adaptive work consists of making a system’s purpose explicit or, in some cases, redefining its purpose, and ensuring that the behavior of the system is congruent with the stated purpose.
Love relates to the principle of “Coherence”—that is, the idea that everything is already whole and that our task, as a collective, is to look for the ways that it is. It means that the solutions we seek, in fact, already exist, and that if we open ourselves enough to the possibilities and listen to our collective wisdom, we can resolve all the problems we face. This is why the process of “Dialogue” or “the art of thinking together” is so important when dealing with tough problems. The technology of Dialogue* is based on deep listening, respect of the positions of others (especially when they are at odd with our own) and on inquiry, all the while suspending assumptions, judgment and certainty, with the intent to see the big picture, patterns and trends and the belief that a new understanding will emerge out of the process. A dialogue is driven by the desire to see connections and to re-unite what has been separated.
As we bring our knowledge, skills, expertise, and all the gifts we were given to facilitating change, let’s also commit to bringing love, both in its traditional and new definitions, as the underlying force and energy driving our adaptive work.
I wish you all a very happy holiday season.
Beatrice
* To learn more about the origin and process of Dialogue, see Dialogue: A Proposal by David Bohm, Donald Factor, and Peter Garrett
Your Body is Your Brain! Learn From it and Be a Mindful Leader
I just participated to an experiential workshop entitled “Cultivating the Brain of a Mindful Leader” facilitated by Amanda Blake, founder of Stonewater, a Leadership Development and Executive Coaching firm based in Portland, OR.
The workshop explored the “application of the latest brain research to the qualities of exemplary leadership.” Blake, who participated in the recent International Neuroleadership Summit that was held this past October, reported that neuroscientists are now coming to accept the until now controversial ideas that “the body is the brain” and that the mind is embodied. (It is important to mention that these ideas have been familiar to consciousness practitioners for a long time and, perhaps, are self-evident to most of us.)
The mind-body dichotomy idea originated from the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes in the seventeenth century with his well-known assertion “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes argued for a disembodied mind having no influence on the body and vice versa. This powerful idea allowed Descartes to reject the existence of any subjective reality. From a Cartesian perspective, the essence of humanity is rationality, that is, our ability to think logically, to set goals for ourselves, to make decisions between different alternatives, and so on.
Following on Descartes steps, the conventional view in cognitive science holds that the mind is only the result of the activity of the brain. In addition, the process of cognition is considered a process of manipulation of symbols and of representation of an external world. However, recent experiments have shown that, by bringing our focus and attention to the mind, we can change the brain’s activities. Also, findings in quantum physics have shown that separation between an observer and an observed phenomenon does not exist when dealing with atomic entities.
Consequently, there is an emergent and growing recognition among scientists that cognition is not “a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living” (Capra, 2002). From this new perspective, all cognitive activity is embodied and context-specific. There isn’t a pure objective reality of the world.
What this means is that living systems – and human beings, in particular – select from the environment which information or disturbances to notice and consequently, create information and assign meaning to it. This is done through a dynamic process called “structural coupling” – a term used to depict a living system that engages with another or with the environment. Living systems learn through their ability to structurally-couple with their environment or with other systems in order to communicate (verbal and non-verbal communication), coordinate behavior, and adapt. This learning is embodied learning because it uses the internal structure of the system and the body to learn in order to take action. (Note that embodied learning is in contrast to the traditional definition of learning as gathering, processing and understanding information.)
When we remove the mind/body dichotomy, we realize there is a feedback loop between thinking and feeling: what we think influences our feelings and how we feel influences our thinking. As Richard Strozzi-Heckler, President of Strozzi Institute, notes: “When our feeling-self and thinking-self are coherent we are at our most powerful. When they’re at odds, we’re a train wreck.” [Read his article “A Return to Lovingness”]. Of course, how we feel and think influences our behavior and how we interact with others. What the workshop’s experiential exercises demonstrated is that language is not necessary to communicate and to influence the feelings and behavior of people around us. People perceive the energy fields that are generated by our bodies, gestures, facial expressions as well as our thoughts, and are influenced by them. We all have had the experience of feeling sad or depressed, for no particular personal reasons, simply because we have been around a sad or depressed person. Keep a frown on your face all day and you will start feeling sad. Don’t we also say that happiness is contagious? Also, it is well know to call center representatives, that smiling while you speak to someone at a distance changes the tone of your voice.
So, how can leaders retrieve their generative power (by “power” here I mean their ability to act mindfully and in a way that empowers others) and become mindful leaders?
Since the mind is embodied, observing the body – our ultimate instrument of perception and action – is critical. Mindful leaders are not only intellectually smart, they have developed the capacity to sense and be aware of their environment and of the state of their own being. Mindful leadership can be regained by observing and monitoring the mind in order to modify its activities.
As Jeff Klein notes in his book Working for Good,
“Our bodies are incredibly intelligent. While we believe we think with our minds, our bodies are great receptors, interpreters, and projectors of experience. They continually read the terrain for us and inform our awareness. They sense our physical orientation and relationship to other bodies. They sense temperature and sustain our balance, and they can detect when our sense of balance is challenged. They carry memories and experiences, and without our conscious intervention they respond to subtle signals to protect and guide us. We can learn a lot if we pay attention to how our bodies feel and respond to our thoughts and actions, and to external circumstances and other people. And we can apply this intelligence to how we move in our work.”
Learn how to tune in to your sensations and body and lead mindfully.
Resources:
Capra, Fritjof 2002, The Hidden Connections: Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability, Doubleday, New York.
Klein, Jeff 2009, Working for Good: Making a Difference While Making a Living, Sounds True, Boulder, Colorado. (See in particular Chapter 2: Awareness and the accompanying exercises.)
Find Your Edge
“Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participant is completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the…cosmos.”
-Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things
A couple of months ago I started Nia Dancing – a dance practiced barefoot that combines both structured and free-form expression and that Portland-based co-founders Carlos Rosas and Debbie Rosas define as “a path to condition, heal and express your self through movement and sensation. A dynamic blend of dance arts, martial arts and healing arts…”
Except for twenty years ago when I was disco dancing, I’ve never really danced. But when a friend of mine shared with me how dancing had helped him navigate through life hardships, I got really intrigued. As I embarked in a personal and professional transition and voluntarily moved my life into the unknown, I knew that I needed to do something that would put me in a beginner or learner situation – a situation that can be both exciting but also challenging, yet in a fun and safe context.
As Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky explain “[L]eading adaptive change requires you to step beyond your default behaviors into an unknown situation and to learn something new. That means experiencing a period of incompetence. Indeed, if you do not feel that you are operating at the very edge of your talents or even just beyond that edge, then you are probably not attacking an adaptive challenge…To diminish the common experience of disorientation and embarrassment as you move past your frontier of competence, find opportunities to try your hand at developing a set of demanding new skills in a structured, safe environment that has nothing to do with the adaptive challenges in your professional or vocational life. Find a low-risk context in which to experience being incompetent.”
While I have practiced Yoga on a regular basis for about seven years, I thought I needed to complement my practice with something more fluid that would help me connect my mind and body in a different way. Yoga is a very personal practice. In contrast, I felt the urge to engage in an art that would help me connect with others. In support of my professional goals of being a change agent and process facilitator, I knew I needed to be at ease within my body and my self and comfortable in the world, even in potentially difficult and intense situations.
I had heard of Nia, and so I went to my first class; I very much enjoyed the experience. As expected, I also felt somewhat awkward, not knowing exactly how to move, not always able to follow the rhythm and somehow very clumsy with my steps. But I kept at it, going twice a week, and I am amazed at the subtle transformation that is occurring within myself weeks after weeks.
There must be a warrior hidden within myself – a peaceful warrior, I hope – as the Nia’s moves I enjoy the most are the punches and kicks borrowed from martial art such as Tae Kwon Do, and the accompanying shouts “Yes!” “No!” “Ah!” that reinforce the warrior-like expression and help release tension and potentially negative energy trapped within myself. At the other end of the spectrum, I also enjoy the fluidity and grace of free-flow movement when we are allowed to move randomly in the entire room and to improvise our dance based on the rhythm of the music played. Improvisation in this case requires much presence and increased awareness of the space and of other dancers in the room.
Overall, Nia is helping me improve my balance, my body and mind coordination while increasing my self-esteem and level of happiness.
So, what will you do to find your edge when you get into a difficult work situation?
Heifetz, Ronald, Grashow Alexander and Linksy Marty (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA.
The Power of Focusing on the “How”
Focusing a group of stakeholders on “how” to solve a complex problem is a powerful strategy to get everyone into the spirit of collaboration, especially when the stakeholders are doubtful on whether or not the problem can be solved in the first place. The story of the planning, design, and construction of the San José Martin Luther King Library (“King Library”), which I am partially recalling below, demonstrates that even the most daunting vision is achievable when a team is capable of developing a collaborative culture of “can do.”
King Library, which opened its doors on August 2003, is one-of-a-kind in the United States, since never before has the merger of two such different institutions as a university library and a city library been attempted. Allowing a community of patrons as diverse as young children, teens, senior citizens, university students and faculty to meet under the same roof is a revolutionary experiment that redefines a library’s mission as one of supporting a whole community, with all its diversity. The idea of a joint library was born in 1996 from the minds of two visionaries – former San José mayor Susan Hammer and former San José State University president Robert Caret – who successfully broke the pattern of indifference and disdain, which had been representative of the relationship between the two entities over decades. Indeed, on the one hand, the city of San José had been struggling over the years with urban decay downtown; the university, on the other hand, faced internal cultural changes and had become very insular. Very little was shared between the two institutions. However, with Caret and Hammer, things began to change. On her side, Hammer viewed the urban university as a main “player” in restructuring downtown. On his side, Caret considered San José State to be a “metropolitan university” and started to develop partnerships that benefited both the university and the community. Both the city and the university had inadequate libraries and were in need of more space; neither of them, however, had a budget that permitted them to expand on their own. Both Hammer and Caret realized that by bringing their resources together, they could build a landmark building that neither could afford alone. The result was a $177.5 million library jointly funded by the university and the city.
The challenges faced by the King Library project team were daunting at many levels: contextual, operational, organizational, cultural, procedural, technical and architectural. The project was very high profile and much was at stake as patrons from both the campus and the city watched the merger of the two major institutions. The clients had never worked together in the past and had the reputation of being insular. Because there was no precedent for a joint library, they had to innovate to combine their respective operational needs into a single set of requirements, while maintaining the integrity of two completely different cultures.
Hammer had defined the main library challenge as making the library operationally smooth, efficient and user-friendly. The library had to provide “seamless services” to its users. Because of the novelty of the concept, many believed the experiment would fail. Opposition to the project quickly developed, in particular on the side of students and faculty, who worried that the availability of the university materials to the general public, i.e., 800,000 potential library users, would impact student access to required materials. The difference of users’ needs – from a graduate student working on a thesis to a toddler playing near-by – was perceived as a gap that could not be filled. The merger of two institutions with different missions and goals was believed to be a huge mistake and the very reason why it had not been done before. On the city side, some worried that city patrons would not be welcome on the campus grounds and that the joint library would cost more to operate.
At the early stage of the planning process, King Library clients had engaged an architect experienced in library design to do a program analysis of needs for the joint library. Strangely, that architect held a very negative attitude toward the project and was openly skeptical about its success. Realizing that the project could not be successful if participants did not believe in its potential success, San José Public Library Director Jane Light influenced the project team to hire the local firm Anderson Brulé Architect (ABA) to facilitate the feasibility phase and the development of a joint operation plan. Having gained the reputation within the San José community for being a very good facilitator, ABA brought to the project a completely new approach to problem analysis and resolution – an approach conducive to collaboration and learning.
When Light hired ABA, she entrusted the firm with a very powerful charter. Light told Anderson-Brulé, ABA president: “I am hiring you to be the optimist. I am hiring you to never ask the question if, but to ask the question how.” Focusing on the “how” question was very inspiring for Anderson Brulé and her team; this charter became central to ABA’s method of facilitation. When, at the earliest stages of the project, the question in everyone’s mind was “What if…,” ABA challenged the client team to answer questions such as: “How would you do this?” “What gets in your way?” “What would stop you?” “How could you move past that thing that stops you?”
The focus on “how” provided a structure to librarians’ discussions and ensured that the team members were maintaining their focus on important questions. It thus helped the librarians to hold their level of anxiety at times when they were uncertain about whether they would succeed in achieving a common solution. The focus on “how” counterbalanced the project uncertainties and helped the librarians to overcome their fear of failure.
The “how” questions helped the project team to create a project “philosophy and personality…that was so contagious that it ended up feeding out the seven long years that it took to build up the library.” This attitude toward resolving issues by figuring out how to make things work was re-emphasized at each main project phase, as new participants got involved. This method help develop a culture of collaboration and an attitude of “can do” rather than “Why? Why do?” The project philosophy became so pervasive that it spread out to all the participants, down to the general contractor and subcontractors. The focus on “how” was used in partnering sessions, for instance, to help team members, subcontractors included, align their goals with the project vision.
Despite the complexity of the project and the inherent uncertainties faced by the “two-headed” client and the project team, King Library was delivered on time, below budget and without a single claim. Months later, the two clients were still highly satisfied not only with the quality of the building itself, but also more importantly, with the joint operation plan they had developed. Even early opponents had to admit the library provides what the city and university patrons needed.
Note: The above story is a slightly modified excerpt of King Library case study included in my Ph.D. Dissertation: “Managing AEC Project Organizations at the Edge of Chaos: An Analysis of AEC Project’s Adaptive Capacity from a Living Systems Perspective” (Completed in Fall 2005)
One evening this past week, I read Gail Lindey’s “Believing Impossible Things.” If I judge by the tears that ran over my face throughout the reading, Gail’s words and powerful personal stories touched me and inspired me deeply. Very sadly, Gail left this world earlier this year. She was an architect who, among many other things, was very active in the field of integrated design and was instrumental in the creation of the US Green Building Council’s LEED building rating system. (You can learn more about Gail on the Delving Deeper website). Her credentials, however, tell us very little about the exceptional woman she was.
In “Believing Impossible Things,” Gail talks about the “Spirit of Sustainability,” which she suggests requires a strong belief in five principles: Choice, Truth, Power, Fun and Laughter, and Love and Gratitude. (See how she defined these principles at the end of this post.)
In the section on Power, she recalls a particular “earth angel” in her life – a medical intern whom she met in a hospital while she was being treated for a brain aneurysm when she was in her twenties. (Note: Gail borrowed the term “earth angels” from Lance Armstrong who used it to refer to his nurse while he was treated for cancer.) That night, while she felt desperate and had lost the desire to live any longer, this man told her his own story; he told her about how his belief in the impossible helped him to survive while he faced his own death. This man and the story he told gave Gail the courage to believe in the impossible and the hope and strength she needed at this challenging time in her life.
We all have met earth angels at some point or another in our lives. As I read Gail’s story, I thought about all the earth angels in my own life who, at difficult times, with a few words of encouragement, a positive attitude, a smile, or a story, gave me the hope and strength I needed to continue the journey. To all my earth angels, in the past and in the future, I want to express my deepest gratitude. You have made a huge difference in my life and, while I may never be able to give you back in a similar way, I wish and hope that I can be an earth angel myself, at times, when someone needs the support.
And, with Gail, and in her own words, I too want to say:
“I DO believe in the impossible.
I believe empty grounds can be made rich.
I DO believe:
• We can change ourselves and how we choose to view and live life. (Choice)
• We can find our own personal truths and share these with others yet also allow others to find their own paths and share. (Truth)
• We can share the fact that there is no limitation to the journey of the human spirit by constantly and consistently empowering ourselves as well as others. (Power)
• We can laugh and giggle 400 (or more) times a day even as adults! (Fun and Laughter)
• We can remember our oneness with all life and be grateful for that oneness. (Love and Gratitude)
I believe in the impossible and I practice believing everyday. (Sometimes even before breakfast!)
I believe in the Spirit of Sustainability and I believe that it can propel us to new levels in our evolution.
Yes, I believe in the “Spirit of (not just) Sustainability (but also) Abundance and Love.”
How about you?”
(The section above is an excerpt from the Conclusion of “Believing Impossible Things”)
beatrice benne 