Finding peace

circle-at-old-timers-cabin

Have recent global and local events of tragedy and terror left you overwhelmed and despairing? Do you wonder how it’s possible to see all that is good and true and beautiful when suffering is so prevalent? Would your hope and personal capacity for weathering this turbulence be restored by having occasion to talk and listen with others who, too, are deeply concerned for the well-being of our precious world?

Would your hope and personal capacity for weathering this turbulence be restored by having occasion to talk and listen with others? 

If so, you are invited to join a circle conversation to explore these and other questions. A space where:

  • our stories are safe and sacred
  • we speak with intention
  • we listen with attention and curiosity
  • we offer no advice or critique
  • any answers and insights we might come to are our own

The details:

November 20, 2016 (7-9pm)
Westminster-Steinhauer United Church
10740 – 19th Avenue
Edmonton, AB
NO COST
Here’s where to register. Space is limited.

Your hosts:

Your hosts in this conversation are Beth Sanders and Katharine Weinmann, local teacher-practitioners of The Circle Way, a lightly formalized and structured methodology for respectfully engaging people in meaningful conversation.

Space is limited so please register as soon as possible.


 

Making meaning as a system

If you didn’t personally hear me speak, how is it possible that you heard me? This is the undercurrent of skepticism that surfaced in the closing circle at an event I co-hosted earlier this month. While the gathering generated a great deal of meaning for participants and the client, this question compels me to dig into listening and meaning-making. Who listens and who makes meaning?

If you didn’t personally hear me speak, how is it possible that you heard me?

Here’s the situation: we invited people to 3-hour workshops to explore how a city can be a learning city. We started with a World Cafe, a series of conversations in small groups with a variety of people, as a way for people to get to know each other and dive into the topic. (Our questions reflected the 4 pillars of the UNESCO pillars of learning: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together.)

After this ‘warm-up’, participants were ready for the big event: to make a 3D model of the city as a learning habitat.

As we made and explored the models, the groups saw patterns in the metaphors and operating principles. They identified the qualities of the system that wants to come more fully into being. They could see:

  1. Connected webs of relationships with multiple layers of pathways and connections
  2. Circles of life
  3. Synergies and exchanges
  4. Nature and natural, organic processes
  5. Gathering places where people come together
  6. Inclusivity and diversity
  7. Beauty and art, whimsy and creativity, fun
  8. Sustainability and self-sufficiency
  9. Infinite possibilities
  10. A city that evolves by learning

Participants identified a way of knowing, doing, being and living together that creates a city that works for them. For my client, who is figuring out her role in stewarding a project to foster learning in the city, this vision is essential. Her work is to figure out how to nurture this system. Not be the system, or make the learning habitat alone, because one person is not responsible for the well-being of a system. Her role is help it be healthy, to live more fully into its pattern. She is one of many gardeners.

Participants identified a way of knowing, doing, being and living together that creates a city that works for them.

The challenge we face is the inertia of staying in familiar ways of relating with each other and being in relationship with the city around us. Just because we can see and feel a new way of operating does not mean we are ready to jump into it. This tension surfaced in our closing circle: one participant spoke to the work as a state of mind, another voiced skepticism about whether we got what we needed to move the project along. While the former could lean into a new way of ‘hearing’ the system, the latter could not.

The skepticism was about the ability of the process to listen. In a World Cafe the hosts–the ‘official’ listeners–don’t hear the conversations, which means that people are not heard–by the ‘official’ listeners. The assumption: if the ‘authority’ doesn’t hear me directly I am not heard.

Four questions come to mind:

  1. Who has something to say?
  2. Who needs to hear you?
  3. Who will digest what you say and make meaning of it?
  4. Who is responsible to respond to what you have to say?

The purpose of this gathering was not to figure out how one person and a steering committee will roll out a project, but how a whole city can live into a project, and the critical support it needs from the one person and a steering committee. This involves a very different kind of listening.

A conventional way of listening to many people is through an interview or survey, where someone sits down with you to hear what you have to say verbally, or reads what you have written. In this way of listening, you tell me what you know or think directly and then I turn around and make sense of what I have heard from you and everyone else I have heard from. An interview or survey is a familiar way of ‘speaking into’ a system; it’s what we know.

METHOD Interviews, Surveys World Cafe + Model Building
WHAT HAPPENS You tell me what you know and think with no interaction with other people You talk and think and go deeper with other people (who may have very different perspectives)
WHO SPEAKS Individuals Individuals and the whole
WHO LISTENS I listen We listen
WHO MAKES MEANING I analyze and make meaning alone We figure out what it means as a group
WHERE YOU FIT You remain outside the system We are inside and part of the system
OUTCOMES I see what’s happening and I tell you We see what’s happening and we build relationships with each other to figure out what’s next
RESPONSIBILITY  I maintain responsibility We share responsibility
WHY I want to know what people think  (informative) We want to know what we think and figure out our way forward together as a whole (collaborative)

Interviews and surveys are informative tools, with their time and place, not collaborative tools. Their purpose is not in helping a system see the relationships and patterns within itself. The choice for my client: informing herself or the city informing itself. The choice for citizens: rely on her to fix things, or jump in and help to improve (see improve vs. fix).

My client’s work, ultimately, will be to help people see and operate in a system that is not linear and tidy. That is the learning for a learning city. The challenge is to figure out how to nurture this system and do so in a way that honours the familiar, linear ways of learning as well.

As citizens and individuals, we must reconcile this fact: as one voice in a survey, or one voice in a World Cafe, I am only one voice among many. Our choice: entrench in the familiar or expand into new ways of making meaning that include us all.

As citizens and individuals, we must reconcile this fact: as one voice in a survey, or one voice in a World Cafe, I am only one voice among many.


 

The expert/theatre trap

At the outset of summer I found myself in the expert trap: I started talking and talking and talking, not leaving any room for anyone else.

Friend A was organizing a big lecture about community connection. Friend B, Friend C and I were talking about how ironic it was to have a bigwig speaker in town to tell us about community connection, with us all sitting there in passive listening mode in a theatre and that we would not make any new connections in our community. So Friend B got in touch with Friend A to see if she would like to circle up and see what could be done. (Friend A is of our tribe of people who see this kind of conundrum.)

The conundrum is that we don’t get to know each other when we sit like this:

theatre style

Deeply embedded in this shape is expertise and the assumption that she at the front of the room has it and we do not. It is an empty vessel approach, where we, as the audience, need to be filled with all the things we do not know. Moreover, even after we have listened for ages, we are given no opportunity to notice what we know and understand differently, to consolidate what we are learning. And we are not given this opportunity as an individual, or a small groups or large groups. We drink from the firehouse then leave with a few drops of nourishment.

It’s not that this mode of information exchange is not needed–it is, under the right circumstances (see last two posts: shapes of conversation and direction or discernment). My point is this: Friend A was caught in a swirling environment of assumption that the best way to talk about connection was to disconnect ourselves from ourselves, and each other, and assume that the expert outsider has more information on the matter than we do. The ‘machinery’ of the city is caught in the assumption that we need to be told what to do, that we are not capable of figuring this thing out. Embedded in this is the further assumption that if we are simply told, we will go and do it and the problem will be fixed.

Friend A pulled off a remarkable feat. She acknowledged the desire, and in fact the need, to hear what the expert had to say (in theatre mode), then created a new shape that allowed people to meet each other, connect with each other, and figure out what this new information meant for them, for our lives and for our city. She did this:

small circles

Instead of leaving with a only a few drops from the firehouse (as is what happens with a lecture), people left having met and connected with people new to them.  They met around topics of shared interest. They took some time to notice what the lecture meant to them in practical ways that will change their lives and the city around them; they began to integrate what they learned into their being as individuals and a loose collective. Friend A delivered on connection not just by inviting an expert in, but by creating the conditions for the audience–citizens–to truly hear the expert by connecting with themselves and each other.

I almost wrecked everything for Friend A it because when Friends B, C and I met with her I fell into the expert trap. We sat at an outdoor cafe table on a sunny early summer day and missed that we were sitting in a circle. I didn’t let others speak. I said what I see, much like is written above, and then said it again and again.

Passion, impatience and my own insecurity got the better of me.

One of the reasons I most appreciate the circle as a shape for conversation is that it helps me find my place with others in a way that allows others to also have their place in the conversation. It does not diminish me: it focuses me. And most importantly, it allows us–me and the people I am with–to better see what we need to see. It does not diminish my passion, but allows it to show up more appropriately.

And, of course, the irony is not lost on me. What I was most critical of out in the world was what I was doing myself.

What I was most critical of out in the world was what I was doing myself.

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What opportunities do you see in your city to shift from the one-way “expert lecture” to create the conditions for collective discernment? What is your role in this?

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Conversation: direction or discernment?

In my last post on the shapes of conversation, I made the distinction between forms of meeting that facilitate direction (the board table and the theatre) and those that facilitate listening and discernment of collective action.

These two options–direction and discernment–are quite distinct from each other in terms of their usual shape, their purpose, and the assumptions made by all involved in where the expertise and leadership resides and how information flows. Further, the role of the “host” also differs, from chairing the meeting to creating the space, or a container, in which the discernment can take place.

DIRECTION DISCERNMENT
SHAPE board table, theatreboard and theatre small circles, large circlecircles
PURPOSE tell, direct, instruct, set people up to go do something listen, share, integrate, figure things out together
EXPERTISE in one, select few in everyone
LEADERSHIP at the top shared, distributed
INFORMATION FLOW from one or few, down to others from everyone to everyone
HOST ROLE chair the meeting co-create the space, or a “container”

Both approaches are right–in the right circumstances. It is a matter of acknowledging the purpose of the gathering and designing for that purpose. (For more on these purposes, see the shapes of conversations.) But these two choices are not mutually exclusive; the circle can be at the board table and direction can be set in a circle.

These two choices are not mutually exclusive. The circle can be at the board table. Direction can be found in a circle.

We don’t have two clear-cut choices. It’s not as though there will be no discernment for collective action at a board table, or that in working in circle there will be no direction established for the group or for individuals. What we do have to recognize is that regardless of the shape we feel the strong pull of expertise, and the assumption that expertise resides only in one or a few of us.

We have a deep-rooted tendency to feel either that “I am the expert”, or to feel that “they are the experts.” There are times when this is true, like my doctor friend with expertise in infectious diseases that I described last week, who has a clear role to inform and direct other physicians about what to do when unfamiliar diseases present themselves. There are many times when we find ourselves with other people and the expertise is shared, but we operate as though expertise–mine or others’–is what rules the day. When we believe this, it dictates the shape the conversation takes, regardless of our physical form. When we find ourselves in the expert trap, looking for direction, or giving direction, we are not stepping into the shared leadership that we are called to offer.

Circle square

With the intention of collective discernment the circle shape can find its way around a table. It depends entirely on how we put ourselves in the conversation. Here are a three principles and three practices my The Circle Way Colleagues and I use, developed by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea.

Three Principles 

  1. Leadership rotates among all circle members
  2. Responsibility is shared for the quality of experience
  3. Reliance is on wholeness rather than any person agenda

Three Practices

  1. Speak with intention: note what has relevance to the conversation in the moment
  2. Listen with attention: respect of the learning process for all members of the group
  3. Tend to the well-being of the circle: remain aware of the impact of our contributions

These principles and practices are a simple place to start, yet challenging to implement because they embody a significant cultural shift from our automatic expertise stance, to one that welcomes, invites and accommodates the diverse expertise within and around us.

Openness to vulnerability is leadership–and this kind of leadership is shared and easier to carry if we are brave enough to notice when it is needed. 

There is a cultural shift required of us to embody discernment, whether at the board table, or in a circle. We are each required, as citizens, to be self-aware in ways we are not well-practiced, and this self-awareness is a necessary precondition to collective awareness and discernment. At most board tables self-awareness is a scary proposition because it comes with vulnerability, but in this cultural shift vulnerability is not a liability, but a strength. Openness to vulnerability is leadership–and this kind of leadership is shared and easier to carry if we are brave enough to notice when it is needed.

Which principle or practice feels the most scary to you? 

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Resource:

The Circle Way Guidelines outline the components of circle, in addition to the principles and practices described above, that help create the conditions for collective discernment in a circle or even at a board table.

**Caveat** This form of conversation is not easily accommodated in a theatre setting for this simple reason: people can’t see each other.

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The shapes of conversations

The shape of a meeting reflects the purpose of the meeting: telling or listening. Both are appropriate depending on the intentional purpose of the meeting, and often telling and listening purposes are simultaneous. Here are questions I ask to figure out what shape I will use in preparing for a meeting:

  • What is the purpose of the gathering?
  • What needs to be told and who needs to tell it?
  • Who will be listening and to whom are they listening?
  • What are we listening for?
  • What is the shape that serves the purpose?

We are most familiar with two shapes of conversation: the board table and the theatre. These shapes, and our behaviour in these shapes, is about expertise and power; at the front of the room, or at the head of the table, is the one from whom we expect will tell us what to do, the boss or the expert. One person has the answers and the rest expect the answers. One person knows what to do and the others will make it happen.

board and theatre
Shapes of telling and following: the board table and the theatre

These are shapes for telling and following, for providing direction.

We all participate in these shapes: the boss/expert expects others to follow and the subordinates have steep expectations of the boss/expert. The boss will say how things will unfold. Subordinates expect clear directions.

The shapes of telling and following are the right choice in the right circumstances. A doctor friend has extensive expertise is infectious diseases and she has a role in the health care system to serve as a resource for front-line doctors. She has knowledge they need in their work; when something strange happens in their practice she tells them what they need to know as a speaker at a conference, at meetings around board tables or by teleconference, or a one-on-one consult. While there is room for questions from front-line doctors to understand what she is telling them, they trust the information she conveys, take it and use it directly. My doctor friend is in the telling role. The front-liners listen and follow.

Listening is a crucial part of telling and following. The subordinates, or the audience, are there to listen and are expected but the boss/expert to listen. This is listening as an individual: I hear what the boss/expert has to say, I take some notes, and I will adjust my actions as dictated.

The shape of a conversation shifts dramatically if the gathering has a purpose different from telling and listening. The intentional purpose of a conversation may be to explore and digest, and figure out a way forward together. In this case, the shape shifts to circle, where the expertise and contributions of everyone–rather than one or select few–are welcomed. The listening is done by individuals and the group because the purpose of the conversation is about collective discernment: we have something to figure out together.

circles
Shapes for collective listening and discernment: the circle of many sizes

These are shapes for listening–as individuals and as a group–that lead to wise action.

Shapes of listening and discernment are the right choice in the right circumstances. A city planner colleague of mine is working to create a new set of rules to guide infill development in his city and he recognizes that there are people with different perspectives on this that need to be taken into account: other people in city hall, builders and developers, and citizens and community organizations. He recognizes that they all have pieces to the city-puzzle we are making. He needs to listen to them all and he recognizes that as these different perspectives listen to each other, better solutions come forward. He offers, around little tables and within the whole group, ways for people to listen to each other and find ways forward that look after a wide range of interests. This tangibly helps him in his work and it enables everyone else make a city that serves them well.

All of these shapes are right in the right time and place. It all depends on the purpose: telling or listening, direction or conversation.

As you design and prepare for your next gathering, ponder these questions:

  • What is the purpose of the gathering?
  • What needs to be told and who needs to tell it?
  • Who will be listening and to whom are they listening?
  • What are we listening for?
  • What is the shape that serves the purpose?

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Interested in learning more about circle? You might be interested in The Circle Way Practicum and/or exploring The Circle Way.

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We connect ourselves

I resisted, then eventually accepted, an invitation. A friend asked me to come to a meeting to share a bit of a story of some work I’ve ben doing, but I didn’t want to go. I knew ahead of time I would be frustrated, but since it would help my friend in their work, I accepted.

My dread: I knew they would not be listening well.

In the middle of this meeting I started to squirm. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t listen. It was exactly as I predicted either because it was my own self-created self-fulfilling prophecy, or I saw only what I wanted to see. I noticed this and took a few deep breaths. As I calmed, this realization came to me:

There is something here for me to learn. Hang in there.

I witnessed people who are really into their jobs, stepping into the difficult work of connecting people with each other, yet they were stuck in the it’s my job to connect you trap. It was our responsibility to name what we wanted to connect with others about and there was one person in the room whose explicit job is to connect us.

I connect you
I connect you

The purpose of this meeting was for people across the city doing similar work to meet each other, but since we sat and listened to a handful of stories, hand-picked ahead of time, we didn’t meet each other. We heard great stories (it wasn’t all bad at all) and we left without having met each other. And meeting is an essential part of connecting.

The it’s my job to connect you trap is hard to spot because it’s business as usual, which reinforces our separateness. We did not meet each other because most of the talking was done by the meeting hosts, plus a handful of others identified ahead of time. We did not meet each other because the meeting was not design for us to meet; if we wanted to meet other people with similar interests, we were to connect with the hosts, who would do the connecting.

I realized that they were missing out on the real innovation in their work: to set us up so we connect ourselves. They didn’t need to set themselves up as the critical structure, they need simply to set us up to be the structure.

We connect ourselves
We connect ourselves

As hosts, they have a choice: be the connector or create environments where we are the connectors. Create habitats in which we find each other.

Simple processes, now well established with wonderful resources easily available, work wonderfully for this kind of meeting:

  • World Cafe–founded by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs–is a process that invites participants to explore ideas together and meet each other in far more than superficial ways in a short amount of time.
  • Open Space Technology–founded by Harrison Owen–is a process that allows a diverse group of people and their diverse ideas to build an agenda together and find people with similar interests.

Both of these process are the heart of what my Art of Hosting colleagues and I call participatory leadership, where we use processes that harness the wisdom of the collective. We do not put ourselves in the hub of the wheel, for that is the I connect you trap. Instead, we create the conditions for self-organizing, so we connect, and then organize ourselves.

The trap tricks you into thinking you need to be at the center of the work, the hub of the wheel. It tricks you into thinking that this is how to connect people and it does this by making your ego think that YOU need to be at the center. In reality, if you are in the center you are in the way of connecting people. There are way more connections possible than you can possibly keep track of or maintain. It’s not your job.

Here’s what I ask myself, to test if the trap is tricking me:

  • Is the work about me being the connector (in the center)? or
  • Is the work about as many people and ideas as possible connecting, with or without me?

Setting ourselves up to connect with each other is counter-cultural. There is a lot of inertia in everything we do to keep us separate, even when our work is about connecting with each other. Even my friend, whose work is about connecting people in spectacular ways, is caught in the trap. Are you?

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When I hear the world, it changes me

NestCity-BlogPostThe main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

As I started to clean off a shelf in my office, these words on a scruffy page of notes leapt out at me. I’ve been struggling with the location of the battlefield for good. It seems this statement comes at a time when I am ready to take it in. Continue reading When I hear the world, it changes me

6 circle lessons (from a dream)

NestCity-BlogPostEvery once and a while a dream knocks me back into reality. I was setting up to run a meeting, the second in a series of three for a client. This meeting was going to work a lot like the first, but I forgot to print off my version of the agenda, the one with all the notes I have about what I need to say. I lost the plot. So I decided to wing it and start the meeting. Continue reading 6 circle lessons (from a dream)

Checking in with the Hermit in me

NestCity-BlogPostI’ve been home for four days and I still feel like I’m away.

A solid circle practice starts with a check-in, a simple way for everyone to arrive and tune in to both self and the group. It can be as simple as one word, or several minutes each, and it is an essential activity that allows me to “arrive” to a gathering, rather than be there physically, but not mentally, emotionally or spiritually. Today, I feel the need to check in with myself. Continue reading Checking in with the Hermit in me

The gifts of generations

The gifts of generations

Who put honey
in your heart of fruition?
in your belief in your soul?
in your fantasy?
in the love in your living room?
in the trust in your own perseverance?
in your steadfast transformation? 
in your calling?
 

Continue reading The gifts of generations