Possibility – and life in general
Here is a brilliant summary of A Failure of Nerve:
This past week I attended a meeting relating to the roll out of a strategic plan. The agenda was to review the requirements for leadership and leadership training. The context was for a mainline church denomination but some of the discussion could apply more broadly.
Several participants had been asked to research and bring leadership concepts and common key words emerged for leadership roles. Words like “mediating”, “perfecting”, offering” and “blessing” appeared in one report. In another the author had been fond of the letter “C” – and used nouns like “character”, “calling”, “competence” and “community”. “Servant” leadership was also on the table.
My own contribution came from a longer paper I wrote some years earlier and I focused first on changes in world view, vision and mission, structural change, personal characteristics and personal development. My key words echoed some of the others – “disicipline”, “humility” and “learner”. I was also strong on “collaboration” rather than “hierarchy” even though we are still working within a hierarchical structure. But leader still assumes followers and someone has to take the first step.
The most interesting submission was a summary of a work by Ed Friedman entitled A Failure of Nerve. The writer of the summary had limited himself to 500 words and boiled down the role of the leader to a non-anxious presence. We spent little time on Friedman’s idea in the meeting, but I had read his book some years before and its mention whetted my appetite to return to it.
A Failure of Nerve was compiled after Firedman’s death in 1996 by his daughter and students and has been recently reissued. It is timely. Friedman was a rabbi and psychotherapist by training and as well as founding a successful congregation he served as advisor to six US presidents as well as to many senior church leaders and individual clients. Even before his death he saw that America in the nineties had become a frightened society, fearing change and seeking safety as opposed to the spirit of adventure of its early explorers and founders. He’s strongly critical of this stance and challenges us to change our mental models.
Friedman is often caustic and witty – and several readers have collected maxims that represent the substance of his thinking. Here are some that apply to leadership:
Much of where Friedman is coming from is defining church congregations and enterprise units as family systems, a concept developed fully by therapist Murray Bowen. It posits that we call rational in congregations and enterprises is always framed by the emotional responses learned in our personal birth and extended families. Those families and tribes, like all systems, seek equilibrium. When things get tense, it’s likely that learned behavior in earlier systems are in play. When things are going well, Friedman says, expect sabotage.
The remedy is for the leader to develop self-differentiation rather than to try to persuade or motivate others to change.If a non-anxious presence is required it assumes there is already anxiety and conflict in the room. But it is working on one’s own development that allows others to learn by example – and take responsibility for their own development.
There is much more to learn in Friedman’s approach – and that will be a feature of future posts.
The orchestral conductor, Benjamin Zander, is a frequent business speaker and famous for his TED talk. now viewed by more than eight million people. Conductors are sometimes viewed as the last of the great dictators. Zander is different. He had an epiphany some years ago when he realized that the conductor of an orchestra plays a different role.
The insight transformed his conducting and his orchestral musicians immediately noticed the difference. Now he’s a leader who asks for input in the form of written comments at every rehearsal. He understands that the musicians’ skills and experience enhance his own.
His gifts as a teacher are remarkable too and they are now shared through masterclasses for all of us on YouTube. The students perform with technical brilliance before he enters in with a consistent message – it is time to relax and let go of the kind of competitive excellence their preparatory training has provided and instead relate to their audience. Transformation happens before our own shining eyes. (This sample and others are well worth watching now or at a later time. To enjoy it to advantage if your time or tolerance is limited, listen a bit to the beginning and move the arrow to 9:00 minutes and watch some hair pulling – not a conventional teaching technique – but see how effectively it works in creating a totally different kind of performer).
Zander’s passion is for introducing classical music to those unfamiliar with it and he does so with incredible skill and experience in making audiences and performers connect. It’s a worthwhile example of how a leader inspires and transforms performance.
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop this morning preparing to write something about framing when a woman outside caught my eye. She was motionless on the sidewalk of a busy street below where streetcars and heavy traffic move constantly. The scene looked something like this:
My camera shots don’t show everything close by – the woman crossing the street was almost run over by a passing car, a streetcar or two passed, and a bike nearly ran into the woman on the sidewalk. Her world was framed by a device that measures about 2.5 x 5.5 inches. As you can see, she was totally absorbed in it.
We are shrinking our frameworks – and ironically expanding them at the same time. Our phones allow us to go anywhere in the digital universe. The question is whether the digital framework will affect our sense of possibility in the real one.
Most of us have been exposed to the diagram puzzle below where we are asked to connect the dots using only four lines without lifting the pen/pencil from the page.
The square is a shape that we know all too well and the shape suggests a straight-forward solution – except that it takes five lines instead of four. The real solution requires us to move outside the frame.
We can observe that we first focused on numbers and measurement in trying to find the solution. But what we have to do is place the image in a much larger box to see more possibilities
The new frame doesn’t necessarily have to be square. It could be a rectangle or ciccle. It just has to be bigger.
When we look for new possibilities, thinking quantitatively will not always work. Other elements also come into play in real transformation. Moving from one frame to another can depend upon seeing relationships – sometimes with people, but also relationships in a universe filled with “joy, grace, awe, wholeness, passion and compassion” as the writer of The Art of Possibility says. When we expand the frame, it opens up more than we can initially ask or imagine.
In the previous post I spoke of Rosamund Zander’s guidance for individual change. She also dealt with bringing change to families and organizations by recognizing that others, like ourselves are walking stories. As the book progresses she focuses on energy.
She starts with a scientific analogy. Energy becomes amplified, she says, when in proximity to waves of similar tone and length. Visionary people use it that way too – though her she defines energy as commitment to something broader than our personal concerns. And it’s not just about getting one’s own way. We enter relationships of collaboration and become catalysts to create a new story.
The physical world is dynamic – an ecosystem where things connect, react and change. The canopy of trees outside my window is awash with green where weeks ago there were naked limbs. Blossoms will turn to fruit, seeds will scatter, new growth will erupt and old growth with succumb to lightning or disease..
It’s a fractal universe too – in nature and in computer simulations and even in emotions when we share feelings and experiences that cross cultures and times.
When we want to change things, we traditionally develop goals, objectives, strategies and tactics as though we are totally in charge – usually forgetting that there are other forces and energies operating around us – in a playful universe of galaxies.
Zander suggests we try to think of ourselves less as actors and doers and more as conduits that interact with the energies of others – especially in bringing about change. That story is called possibility and it mirrors natural evolution. Humans act and talk. How we do both has a marked effect on the bigger picture. She observes
We reconcile by acts and words; we restore through how we relate and how we grow; we inspire through what we build and the art we make; and we cure ourselves by how we care for others and what we give away. In those ways we bring our hearts into a collective resonance – and that is where the power lies.
Nations have child stories that often need a re-write. As we work on our personal maturing, we change our habits and find new insights and truths that become more like the patterns of nature. Rather than either/or we learn to live with ambiguity. We lessen our need to always be right or to avoid the realities staring at us.
Our caring for the earth needs a rewrite even more. Evolution has always favored invasive species – yet humans are the most invasive of the lot. Urban living divorces us from the natural world. Nature embraces all systems, Zander says, while we have primarily looked after ourselves.
She has several prescriptions – get out and walk in nature, question the child stories that place man at the center as the hero. Stop treating nature as a thing to exploit and re-frame it as an evolving system constantly becoming more complex and beautiful. Take the same stance toward human relationships. “What would be a more compassionate or collaborative way of doing things? Through the practice of what art may I expand my heart?”, she asks. It’s an invitation to join an infinite story.
She closes with what she terms infinite games:
The entire book is an entertaining reminder that I am not the center of the universe – and at the same time, there are plenty of new possibilities ahead.
Dynamic Thinker 