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Despite all the good advice about resolving conflict, perhaps best exemplified by Stephen Covey’s famous line, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” people mostly don’t. When the emotion of conflict takes over and the higher functioning parts of the brain have been hijacked, what we want is to be understood, to be seen for our hurt, our pain, our sense of offense from disrespect first. Even as we try to talk it out, another voice within may say, “he doesn’t get it” or “she’s still covering up” or “he says he won’t do it again but I don’t believe him.” We bring, in essence, our firmest opinions of each other and the other person’s presumed motives.

Having worked as a third-party facilitator over the years with many two-person workplace conflicts, my role seems to almost always include offering a different perspective to counter the rigid negative beliefs people hold about each other. They often see the other person as unrepentant, self-excusing, and “having an agenda.” Sometimes, these beliefs are almost funny because they are so extreme or so clearly projections, but mostly they are just heart-breaking. It isn’t a case of not listening; it’s a case of listening and then actively discarding the face value meaning of the exchange. It goes something like this:

Person One: “I didn’t come to you when it happened the first time because I didn’t want you to get angry.”

Person Two: “It’s because you didn’t come to me that now I am angry.”

Person One: “Yes, I understand that. I’m sorry. Next time I’ll do it differently.”

Person Two: “How do I get through to you how disrespectful it is when you talk to other people but don’t talk to me?”

Person One: “I really am sorry. I get it!”

Later, Person Two says to me in a private one-on-one debriefing, “Person One isn’t that sorry. She’s just saying that. I don’t believe she won’t do it again.”

I ask, “How come?”

“She didn’t come across to me as genuine,” Person Two replies. “Did you think she was that genuine?”

“Yes,” I say. “I don’t have any reason to believe she’s not.”

Similarly, when Person One and I debrief, she says to me, “Do you see what I mean? I try to talk to him and he just gets madder!”

“Yes,” I say. “And I sense he’s really trying to be honest with you about what’s going on for him.”

“Maybe so, but I think he knows he can bully people and he likes it that way.”

You’ll notice as a savvy student of the human condition that I become each person’s surrogate and the argument is basically continuing. Obviously, I see things differently, but if I’m not careful our private debriefings can actually reinforce the conflict.

The combatants in this common scenario are failing to adopt what my colleague and co-author, Kathleen Ryan, used to call “the face value rule,” a simple principle about giving the benefit of the doubt. If I say I’m sorry, I’m sorry. If you say you get it, you do. If your not talking to me makes me angry, it’s so. It is all about taking people at face value. This, it turns out, is part of what it means to extend trust rather than hold onto mistrust.

People in conflict can have a difficult time with the face value rule because it violates their ego-protective “truths” about the other person, truths that are really, of course, assumptions. The problem is these background assumptions at the core of the conflict are not as discussable with the other person because they are so highly offensive.

A more serious conflict happens when the parties begin to assert their negative assumptions in an aggressive way.

Person One: “What you can’t handle is this: you blow up whenever anybody suggests you have the tiniest imperfection. You freak out and retaliate!”

Person Two: “And what you can’t handle is the fact you’re a coward who sneaks around criticizing people behind their backs because you don’t have the guts to say what’s really on your mind. And no matter how many times you say it, the truth is you’re not sorry at all.”

Sometimes people dance around these angry “truths” a great deal, but eventually they begin to “leak” and sometimes “gush” out in a moment of deep pain. The goal at this stage seems to be to force the other person to acknowledge a weakness by rubbing it in his or her face. “I see you for who you really are,” seems to be the theme, “and I’m not going to let you get away with it.” But this is gasoline thrown on the fire.

And such statements can cause a rift that will last forever. Perhaps in the best case, the participants in the conflict each go home with the fire and think about it. Maybe they ask a spouse or friend a couple of questions. “Do I blow up when some imperfection in me is pointed out? Do I really do that?” or “Tell me the truth, do I talk about people behind their backs too much?”

This period of reflection may lead to some new understanding — if the spouse or friend is both compassionate and truthful.

Person One and Person Two go back to work in this better scenario a little chastened, with the tension still there, but in time one or the other may apologize and the air gets softer and clearer.

So, if we were going to replay the whole scene, there’s another possible way the script could run.

Person One: “I didn’t come to you the first time because I didn’t want you to get angry.”

Person Two: “I didn’t know you were concerned about that, and I’m not sure I understand.”

Person One: “It may be as much my problem as yours, and I apologize for that. You’re right I should have come to you.”

Person Two: “Well, you know I do want to hear from you if I’ve done something that’s upset you. But I don’t understand why you wouldn’t talk to me — that hurts!”

Person One: “I know I’ve got to do a better job of confronting my own fears about speaking up to you. Are you open now to some feedback about that?”

Person Two: “Yes. Tell me.”

Person One: “Okay, here goes…and I would appreciate your feedback in return.”

And then, after a time, both of them share: “And here’s what I am learning from our conversation….”

To get to this second script requires personal application of the face value rule — on both sides. Simple enough to understand, harder to do, but why?

It’s easy to chock it up to ego and protection of self-image. Those are the fear factors, for sure. But at a deeper level, I think it is also an unfamiliarity with our own hearts, a faithlessness in our ability to accept and then to reach across the divides and separations that are natural to our relationships. The heart thrives on being able to bridge, to reach across voids, inner and outer. It is only our failure to truly accept these voids as real that stops us. We want to believe in a fantasy — and this too is part of the ego — that we ourselves are hidden and omniscient, and that we have no real agency or capability to fix things. That’s why the ego wants so badly to believe it can actually see into the other person, that person’s hidden motives and real nature. It is this “knowledge” of the other person that excuses us to be silent, uncreative, passive, walled in. But that is all fantasy and projection. That’s just our own ego trying to remain hidden by claiming the other’s real nature is so plain.

The heart, by comparison, seems to thrive on how well we accept our real separation from one another, our differences and our egos, so that we can then build a real bridge. This is a great deal more than simply “agreeing to disagree.” The bridge is the product of the void in the way separation is what makes an active apology possible and necessary. The void demands our energy, our agency and our forgiveness.

No one can possess another’s heart and when we think we can see into someone else better than he or she can, then it’s quite likely we really don’t know our own heart at all.

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It is tempting, in the midst of the big economic, social, and political changes going on now — not to mention human impacts on the earth itself, to want to turn and run, to protect what we have as individuals and play it safe. Isn’t that the smart thing to do? I know the feeling and have watched friends falter in the current economy and political strife — “go dark” to their own possibilities, become negative, “practical,” settling for less while working ungodly hours to keep what they have. Go into emotional hiding.

Instead of speaking up we keep our heads down.

Instead of setting limits and boundaries for what is right, we go along.

Instead of following our dreams, we give them up to worry about what we could lose.

Instead of acting from our hearts, we chill into self-protective logic.

This is the definition of a society — of people — increasingly driven by anxiety. Anxiety and uncertainty that seem to be everywhere, and that seem to be increasing. But as Lolly Daskal points out in a a recent post: “Uncertainty may cause you fear. But the fear of the unknown expands your knowing.”

I take this beautiful phrase of Lolly’s to mean that instead of turning to run or playing it safe, the best course is to explore the fear, to get in touch with it directly and authentically, to let it emerge for what it is and then decide how to proceed. This “fear consciousness,” I believe, can lead to heightened awareness, powerful reflection — and something else — a reduction of the fear itself. By looking into that eye, fear’s energy can actually begin to transform into a different kind of mastery and vitality, while the alternative — not looking — becomes simply a form of denial, a fantasy that means we are being driven unconsciously ever farther away from our own courage. We let fear lead us into self-betrayal.

As human beings we are built for something else — something so much better. As Carl Jung writes in the epigraph at the beginning of this post, the alternative is to “affirm our destiny.” But what is that?

For the last seventeen years I have worked in inner and outer ways to understand what Jung meant. For ten I co-facilitated a workshop for leaders devoted to the notion that we all have a destiny, a path to follow, a story, an “arc” of learning as we inevitably move toward higher levels, not only of consciousness, but of direct contribution to the world. People came to the workshop with a sense of restlessness, that “things had happened for a reason” or a new understanding had been awakened in them through some meaningful coincidence: the meeting of a particular person, for example, or the appearance of resources for a deeper purpose. To me, personally, destiny is like standing up in my own life, making a choice that then seems to follow some more fundamental but also unique thread. And that only by accepting this thread as my calling, my private and individual form of integrity, my meaning, can I live the life I was meant to live.

It is time, I believe, to not let the craziness and chaos of all those shifting economic, social, and cultural paradigms rob us of our true work in the world, our relationships, or our souls. As always, we are being hollowed out by our adversities; hollowed out, as they say, to become the flute through which a new melody will be born.

It is one thing to ask, “What is my destiny?” and relate it to a sense of personal purposes and gifts, which is most often the way people think about the concept of destiny. In this sense it represents a “destination,” an end-point, and it depends on some special talent and aptitude. But there is at least one other way to consider it, and that is that our destiny really takes us back to our own beginnings — our “birthright.” In this sense, destiny and birthright are the same. The circle completes itself. Let me explain this second meaning as it has showed up in my own life.

Many years ago, in a dream I was assisting a doctor with a patient on an operating table. Blood was everywhere. I said to the Doctor, “Do you want help? The patient is hemorrhaging.” He said with stoic passivity, “No, there is nothing that can be done now.” But I ran out of the room in a search for just that help. I came to a crowded waiting area filled with other patients and with nurses. I called out, “The doctor needs help!” But immediately a nurse came up to me and angrily said, “That’s none of your business. We will decide whether the doctor needs help!” I left in despair, went back to my room in a nearby hotel. But then, something on top of my dresser caught my eye, a pile of sparkling stones I’d never seen before. And when I picked them up I found they formed a kind of magical or sacred necklace of unknown origin. I placed it over my head and as I did so, all of my experience was suddenly illuminated, a feeling of total peace and well-being enveloped me. The necklace brushed my cheek and there are no words for it, but in a way I felt as if I had been kissed by a divine being, an angel if you will.

I shared the dream with a therapist who at the time was helping me work through a divorce. She commented, “Well, the first part of the dream would seem to be about your work and the worldly obstacles it entails. But the second part, there you’ve touched your birthright.” I was stunned. Jung’s words came to mind: nothing had been “disturbed” in me and I was still “victorious.”

Indeed, I had touched a profound core, one that over time has become the real story of my own life, the end and beginning of it, destiny and birthright. And all I can say is that it has nothing to do with fear at all, or with gain or loss, winning or losing. It has to do with deeper things that I struggle to express but pull me every day to do the work I do, to be who I am in my heart — whether “the patient,” in fact, can be saved.

I have tried many times to find ways or words to adequately express that feeling of the necklace and that other-worldly kiss. Recently, I discovered something that comes a little closer although distance still remains, a recording of the Buddhist activist, poet, and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, a poetic meditation put to music. It is on a (magnificent) CD devoted to facilitating the passage of life and death. You can find the recording here with Thich Nhat Hanh’s words below.

The End of Suffering

May the sound of this bell penetrate deep into the cosmos
Even in the darkest spots living beings are able to hear it clearly
So that all suffering in them cease, understanding come to their heart
And they transcend the path of sorrow and death.

The universal dharma door is already open
The sound of the rising tide is heard clearly
The miracle happens
A beautiful child appears in the heart of the lotus flower
One single drop of this compassionate water is enough
to bring back the refreshing spring to our mountains and rivers.

Listening to the bell I feel the afflictions in me begin to dissolve
My mind calm, my body relaxed
A smile is born on my lips
Following the sound of the bell, my breath brings me back
to the safe island of mindfulness
In the garden of my heart, the flowers of peace bloom beautifully.

So what does any of this mean to you? Assuming it means anything at all!

This is not about concocting some fantasy of personal purpose or lodging forever in some private, disconnected nirvana. It is about knowing, experiencing, feeling that thread in your own life in a deeper way, and helping others around you feel and experience and follow their own threads as well. We listen to one another; help each other with our adversities, help each other remember that birthright. We confront our differences and distances — some of them large — and we are deepened and hollowed out even more. Bringing these threads to the surface, talking about them, I’ve found, results in an unusually strong, vibrant community; results in us remembering who we are and what we are about, no matter what tough condition our personal world or the world at large might be in.

In this sense, the truth is no one finds or follows their destiny alone, do they? We are in this together, a complex community and subtle matrix, many different petals, perhaps, of a single irreducible flower.

___________________________________________________

Please join Lolly Daskal and me for a tweet chat, “Leadership and Destiny,” on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 8:00 PM EST. To participate, please go to this page, enter Lolly’s hashtag (#leadfromwithin) and sign in. It’s a great community of learning: fun, fast, full of soul.

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Let’s imagine a “storyboard;” you know, a series of images that are like a comic strip or a plan for a movie. Except this storyboard represents a series of important moments in your life, learning, and leadership work. What pictures would be there as the major turning points of your own story? And where, if you project this story forward into the future — as your destiny — would you like your future turning points to take you?

On Friday and Saturday, March 2-3, 2012 at the Talaris Conference Center in Seattle, I am facilitating an inexpensive, small-group workshop, called, “The Arc.” It is specifically designed to help participants answer these questions through the lens of personal power and the experience of “conscious wholeness,” the state of mind, body, emotion, and spirit where your personal power and sense of fulfillment are greatest. Please download the full brochure here, reviewing it as a possible investment in yourself and also to pass it along to others who could benefit.

The workshop requires only that you have a strong desire for self-knowledge and for better ways to translate that knowledge into action. The returns for this self-investment can be amazing: deeper, more collaborative relationships, higher levels of commitment, lowered conflict, increased trust, and centered, effective influence for change. You awaken in yourself what others want to follow for themselves. If these are important aspects of your leadership capabilities and presence, I invite you to talk with me about how the workshop fits with your personal development goals. Take a look at the brochure and shoot me an email to register or to set up a time to discuss the potential benefits of the workshop for you.

Sign-ups are limited. Please register by February 10, 2012 for this opportunity.

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I was moved, recently, by an electronic card I received celebrating the solstice: well-wishes and an image of apples still hanging from a leafless tree; snow falling at dusk; a somber but not heavy light.

Source Unknown

It’s good to know that behind the human hubbub of this season, old cycles continue. In a world of linear thinking — strategy, goals, progress, accomplishments — the soul can still find its ancient patterns of activity and rest, outer and inner fruitfulness. I believe we need that — a teaching with more than a genetic depth.

The work is hard enough these days, and it is a boon to remember and celebrate “the unconquerable sun” that still shines somewhere beyond the clouds, the horizon.

As Wallace Stevens said in a familiar poem I never tire of hearing:

It was evening all afternoon
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

You don’t have to know exactly what it means. Intellectual discourse loses its power before the poem — especially when looking out my office window I see the bare cottonwood and a dark mass in the tree, not a blackbird but an eagle watching the lake below. Not snow but Northwest rain; the sound of traffic on the road below, the bleak quality of impending dark.

Renewal starts in minor things. The image of the apples reminds me of a childhood memory, of growing up with an orchard and all the tree limbs gone black and sharp in the December rain, while one elderly winesap kept her dwarf, “wine-dark” fruit still hanging. Now, fifty years later, I recall the taste of those apples as I sat shivering in the branches of a slippery tree; a taste cold and sweet as any past year summed, now ready to be left behind.

The word, “bleak” is there for a reason. How would we know the sun is unconquerable? Unless it, too, fell, became weak and then returned a little more each day, as if strength and renewal, as if victory itself could never be achieved without a time of doubt. Without darkness, faithlessness before the vivid evidence of nature — our nature — makes itself finally known.

I can still taste those apples, listening to the traffic on the road below. There was a road then, as now.

The eagle lifts off from the barren tree in a twilight of rain.

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Recently, I announced a two-day workshop I will facilitate in March, 2012 called, “The Arc: Living the Full Story of Your Personal Power.” (If you would like to know more about the workshop, please download the brochure at this link). I am excited by the model I will introduce and the format of the event — and I’m looking forward to having some meaningful fun with a small group, no more than about fifteen people.

So why focus on personal power, anyway? Isn’t that just another name for assertiveness and self-confidence? No, I don’t think it is. Personal power is the result, I believe, of at least four different capabilities coming together in a way that transforms situations and people, and leads also to a sense of great personal fulfillment. Surely sometimes changes do come from asserting what you or I might want and need, but it would be a great oversimplification to say that’s all there is to it.

Without getting into all the dynamics of the model I’ll use in the workshop, consider the times when you’ve felt your own strongest sense of personal influence. Was it the result purely of your assertiveness, or was it a more complex experience? Did it also involve trust, for example? Or aspects of offering, sharing or inviting as much as taking a clear position for what you wanted or needed? Did it include your values, doing or saying what you sensed was “the right thing”? In essence, did it touch deeper chords of who you are as a person?

This is your agency, your capability as an individual. And that subjective experience of agency is much different than the authority of any formal role you might have been given. For some this subjective experience is stronger and more constant than for others, and they are correspondingly less controlled by conditions and circumstances, and better able to exert influence.

My phrase for this complex feeling is “conscious wholeness,” the state of simultaneously experiencing your own inner well-being and fulfilling your capacity to impact the world. For what it’s worth, I believe this complex experience is mostly beyond the reach of ego. In fact, I believe it tends to be a state that almost entirely puts aside the pleasures and pains of ego in favor of simply living a meaningful, positive, even simple life — though the external circumstances themselves may be complicated.

So why is personal power so important right now? Because it is exactly what will break through the recalcitrant malaise that is affecting our social institutions, particularly our workplaces.

As I understand it, there are two very large rocks in the path right now. One is the moral compromise that’s going on for many, the desire to go into denial and keep one’s head down in order to survive, to be quiet and keep working. Just this morning I was talking with a guy from my utility company about how hard everybody seemed to be working. He easily conjectured this was the result of people’s fear for their jobs. “I shiver to think what it would be like trying to get a job in this economy,” he told me. Recently, Meg Wheatley, of Leadership and the New Science fame — along many other books, has begun to speak out on the increasing regression to fear-based management approaches.

The other rock is disengagement of employees — with record numbers no longer willing to invest a great deal of emotional energy in their jobs and organizations.

I suspect the first and second rocks are closely related. The fear drives and and combines with apathy so that many are working harder but with less spirit, the product of more or less dehumanized, control-oriented bureaucratic workplaces. Unfortunately, such workplaces are not likely to be saved by waiting for other people to change them, specifically those with authority. They will be changed by us and from within — and that is precisely why personal power is more important than ever right now.

Vaclav Havel, the dissident, playwright, prisoner and former president of Czechoslovakia died on Sunday. For those unfamiliar with him, this obituary will be helpful. By bringing up his name, I am not suggesting the totalitarian conditions under the Soviets can be compared to what people are experiencing in the American workplaces today — although the features and structure of bureaucratic repression probably do hold some similarities. Instead I am pointing out what it means to use personal power to effect change. Havel lived the life of an artist, a writer, but also a social and moral artist, bringing a quality of modest, humanistic integrity to his life. He is known for leading massive social change by “living the truth” in just about as complex and dangerous a set of circumstances as anyone could imagine. He was like all of us, imperfect, but he also serves as an exemplar for what it means to live a meaningful life, both internally and externally — an exemplar of conscious wholeness and personal power.

Speaking to the U.S. Congress in 1990, not long after becoming president of his country, he said,

…consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed–be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization–will be unavoidable.

While he was speaking of broader society, his words could just as well be applied to any environment, including workplaces where the human heart, reflection, humility, and responsibility are denied in favor of short-term economic outcomes and value for a few shareholders, not many stakeholders. Havel believed in “living in truth” as a means of change, and he saw the whole process of change beginning with himself, internally.

The world has lost a powerful leader who rejected fear, passivity and apathy and stood against them. It takes a certain quality to do such a thing. I call it conscious wholeness — the access to broader courage, deeper commitment to action, more transformative, humble energy; to a more meaningful and fulfilling kind of presence that reaches all the way to the core; that penetrates us, bridges us and unites us.

That is what I mean by personal power.

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Recently I have found myself in conversations with good people slipping into a kind of professional despair. This seemed to be the contradicting underside of the public face they need to exhibit. They have learned to keep silent and pretend a certain optimism in order to maintain position or stature — while privately leaking despair about the nature of their organizations within the context of society at large.

In one case, a colleague wrote to me:

For some reason it seems that certain forces in our world…encourage us daily to restrict our human empathy only to those who are sufficiently like us or support us…It makes me wonder how and why we seem to disconnect from our humanity when we engage in collective pursuits — like business and government…Somehow when we become a “we,” we eventually become an “us” vs. “them.” And in that competitive structure we become very quickly and systematically disconnected from our human values and begin to assess our progress in the metrics of a zero-sum game, where there must be winners and losers — the haves and have nots, by definition.

In another conversation, a senior executive lamented his organization’s emphasis on “greater and greater personal risk-taking as if,” he said sarcastically, using the sexist language common to his environment, “we all have to ‘man up’ at every turn.” A third colleague approached me for advice on how to handle situations in his profession where the trend-line of money trumping ethics was becoming increasingly common — even viewed as a new “opportunity.”

In these conversations, along with the frustration, I also sensed a quality of carefulness, as they did not want me to “misconstrue” their negativity. I took that to mean their feelings were too dangerous to express publicly — in a way that further underscored their professional despair as equal parts weariness, sublimated anger, and fear. The message seemed to be that if you want to be hired — and stay hired — you must pretend this is a desirable state of affairs. You must pretend to be positive, a “team player.” You must not acknowledge reality, let alone protest against it.

This is the common darkness. The news is full of it and wow is it easy to fall into. So much organizational ideology seems to have regressed into an even stronger emphasis on numbers, overwork, employment insecurity for individuals, and hierarchical thinking. And despite experiments to the contrary and an increasing emphasis on innovation, the truth is that control in our society appears to be a bigger priority than ever. With the middle class disintegrating and the blinders torn off about who has the money (and power) and how they got it, the quality of helplessness inside and outside organizations continues to grow. If the Occupy movement signals increasing tension, for example, it also emphasizes the feeling of helpless rage that goes with it. Meanwhile, politically, left and right play out a stalemate that disappoints just about everyone except those who benefit from the stall. We seem stuck in a quagmire of competitive self-interest, blame and self-protection. I find myself pulled right into the mud some days, right along with everybody else.

Yet, now, I also find myself thinking about a line I found in a post by Gina Hayden: “The problem is not the system,” she writes. “The problem is the consciousness of the people within the system.”

What I love most about this line is that it moves the conversation from control — and helplessness — to the social milieu of our own awareness and implied leadership. What it can cause us to do is challenge our own consciousness, to look directly into that professional despair to see it as a barrier that holds us back, to see it as less than inevitable. Maybe we can’t light a bonfire, but we can light a candle, and we do not have to hypocritically succumb in the process to the problem we say we want to solve, which is creating an “us” versus “them.”

To get out of the stuckness, we must, I believe, find out exactly what our humanity is, rather than defeating ourselves by blinding ideological fights over whether a few or the many should have control of society. We must, instead, claim our birthright, which (at least to me) is not so much an issue of freedom versus control as it is an issue a level or two down, one that has to do with claiming the intrinsic powers we all possess: our worthiness, our capacity to give to each other, our ability to collaborate and understand one another, and to do the right thing. If we claim these powers, seeing them as a source of our personal leadership, the helplessness — aka darkness — can begin to evaporate as our actions find their true objectives.

Another way to put forward this process of self-leadership is to notice that the outer landscapes of culture and society reflect a common inner dilemma. Trying to solve these problems purely through social action in the world without the necessary groundwork can easily miss the real opportunity for collective growth that a shared consciousness can bring. To get at that consciousness, we first have to ask each other, Who are we? What can we become together? What can we create? What is humanity and how can it evolve now? And our answers must transcend the ideologies that have been keeping us stuck.

The ugly truth is that helplessness, if adopted as a position, as a cynical ideology of its own, too easily becomes just another competing form of control. As a wise person said, “conflict is a shared problem.” Perhaps it is only denial that this is so that most keeps us in the dark.

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So much already has been written about the shocking events at Penn State, often with justifiably deep outrage. I, too, want to wail.

There are, after all, so many kinds of victims:

• the children

• the families

• the students

• the players

• the fans

• the community

• the country

• all of us — anyone at all who knows.

We could also add to this list, depending on your perspective, the perpetrator and the men who failed “to do more.”

All are wounded by these events. The perpetrator himself, who led with his own wounds, will most likely pay for them for the rest of his life.

And now so much confusion, side-taking, competing views of what to do, and the need for explanations, investigations, exoneration or blame.

Yet none of that will really do — ever. That’s the nature of a wound to society. There is only the shock and clawing grief that it has happened — something we must live with whether or not we can ever “understand” what occurred.

In the end we only have the pain of facing our humanness and our capacity for such moral failure. It would be easy to separate ourselves, to say this is not me, not you. We are not capable of such things. But the nature of the Shadow in all of us, and in society itself, is precisely this misbegotten belief. The events at Penn State are a mirror of what human beings are eminently capable of — that’s really what scares the heck out of us. We can be weak. We can be depraved. And all the explanations of how those who covered up were simply caught up in their own power and anything that might jeopardize it, cannot turn out the lights on what is to be seen in that very harsh mirror of the soul. We don’t like to “go there.” We want to believe we can simply manage according to our strengths and pretend to ourselves that all else can be forgiven. This is the signal of an immature culture, one that makes self-confrontation something that others should do, but we do not have to do for ourselves. The irony of the Shadow is that we are headed straight for it when we claim that we don’t hold any darkness within us.

The most difficult part is the realization that we are in part those children. We are in part also those families. We are those fans and players, that community — and yes, a part of us is also the perpetrator and those who gave the perpetrator permission — and this is especially true every single time we say to ourselves “not my problem.” Because that’s exactly how this occurred. Somebody else did this. Not me. I’m not guilty. I am not responsible for what happened to the others. And each one of these “not me’s” wounds society just a little more.

I personally do not think the perpetrator and his accomplices were overwhelmed with their own power so much as they simply did not feel responsible for what happened to others. And this is the perfect result of that darkest shadow side of American individualism, this outrageous betrayal of society, which is about hurting others with impunity — and then excusing ourselves and speaking through lawyers before the mirror indeed becomes too bright. This sordid core on the other side of precious individualism is what Americans have to look at right now. How many more times will it need to be rubbed in our faces that this is a society with a flawed sense of society, one that that is wounding itself in the name of a steadily maintained unconsciousness about the real impacts of our lost mutuality?

Penn State is a symptom. Not much different than other symptoms. The perpetrators that caused and are continuing to cause financial collapse, and the widening gap between rich and poor, conservative and liberal is another symptom of the same disease of lost mutuality — so well described in a recent article by Bill Moyers. This is what you get when you build institutions and businesses and a whole underlying culture based on the overuse of saying “yes” to ourselves and “no” to anybody else.

We need to regain — maybe reclaim is the better word — a sense of meaningful, humane balance. Individualism is good when its primary results are courage, initiative, confidence and self-worth, a unique and meaningful life, the ability to stand up to oppression. But that essential personal power must be balanced also with the power to love and give selflessly, the power to work together collaboratively and to trust, and the power to do the right and ethical thing. Our society is far, far out of balance right now, and incidents are likely to come more frequently until at last we give ourselves a chance to look once more at our birthright, as the founders of this great country did, deciding for ourselves what a good society really is. It’s time to take stock because right now we are creating a new kind of oppression for ourselves and others based on what one writer called, a culture of rape. I take that term to include but also go beyond sexual exploitation to human exploitation, which starts in big and little ways with making other people into things we are no longer responsible for.

If we can face that in our hearts and souls, then I think the healing will find a good place to begin.

Technorati Tags: Shadow and Wounds
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Recently, Chris Grams over at the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) sent out a group report on using “communities of passion” to help achieve MIX’s stated goal — reinvent management. It’s a great report and a great project, and I encourage you take a few moments to look over the findings and discoveries. In responding to Chris by email, I found myself commenting on the three types of barriers facing such communities in our organizations: structural, procedural and ideological. Our spirits, the report makes clear, can be deeply affected by these barriers, representing such common problems as silos and bureaucracies, systems that don’t work, and underlying negative beliefs that mitigate against any kind of real innovation and excitement.

In a classic way, I found myself writing to Chris: “Yes, and…” there’s at least one more barrier, one more stone wall, the internal one in us that keeps all of these other barriers in place. In my heart of hearts that’s the way I see it, I guess: the whole infrastructure and culture held together by a persistently group-ingrained unconsciousness that works to keep things as they are. It’s like the old forcefield analysis perspective. There is what keeps things — and us — as they and we are, and there is what moves us forward toward growth, change, and learning. I believe this push/pull is as true for organizations as it is for individuals, and vice versa.

The breakthrough comes for both individuals and organizations in much the same way, by seeing something better (sometimes only intuiting the future’s presence) and growing increasingly hungry for it. Right now, organizationally, there is a lot of hunger for what’s better — what’s more open, more innovative, more human, and there is plenty of energy, as MIX is testament, to find new organizational methods and structures. But I don’t sense we are at the revolution yet. The revolution is not in organizational methods and structures alone; it is also in the people — the way we regard others and regard ourselves.

Not long ago I had the chance to interview the head of the Human Interface Technology Laboratories, Tom Furness. You can read the interview in this document, my monthly newsletter — the conversation is about halfway down the page. Tom explains how human love is a precondition for releasing the kind of innovation that makes a real difference. I couldn’t agree with him more. Love and self-knowledge and maybe beauty and silence, too, are, as they say, killer apps. Yet often, too often, those are still the elements left to wait outside the door to the room where innovation is supposed to be happening. The question is how to get to the place where they are “in” — as in “in the field” of the relationships, and consciously within a discussion, not just of ideas, but of the people themselves, their own growth and possibilities. As Tom and I worked on the interview for my newsletter, we talked about that field, how you can sense it as being tense and evaluative or supportive and encouraging, and the differences that can make.

We are all part of one highly complex, interactive system, for sure. We all are related to one another in ways that we are still discovering, perhaps as Tom concludes, right down to how we privately think about each other — thinking being a form of energy — and therefore how we affect one another at an organic, psychic level. No one really has the solution yet, but I believe it will come. It won’t be one, I’m guessing, where we will try anymore to separate people from their ideas and then vote for the best idea. I think, instead, it might come from the stunning and almost unimaginable insight that there is no best idea at all, just ones that are inside us and either put love and awareness and beauty first, or do not.

There, I find myself thinking. Design that organization. Manage by that precept. Let’s see what happens.

Technorati Tags: Changing the World
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After conducting some training last week in Phoenix, I went up to the Grand Canyon with my wife for a couple of days of R & R. The weather was perfect, cool mornings warmed gradually by the intense autumn light, and the Canyon did what it has always done for me: grant a sense of perspective. I only have to look over the edge straight down into its depths thousands of feet below to feel that strange combination of anxiety and stark, mind-blowing wonder. I become a third party to myself, for a moment an observer and a listener to all the inner voices warning me to get back from the danger — and then in the next instant letting those voices all vanish into the gigantic, outstretched space. The opposites merge. I feel both totally insignificant and totally whole in the beauty.

I returned from the Canyon to find this wonderful paper by Gianpiero Petriglieri, Jack Denfeld Wood, and Jennifer Louise Petriglieri on “personalization” of management learning. It is about the distinctive value of personal reflection when designed to be part of a management and leadership development curriculum. I haven’t read anything in a long time that so well summarizes the benefits of reflective practice to the growth of leadership capability. These benefits include self-understanding and self-management, of course, but also the integration and grounding of experience as part of a life narrative. Reviewing relevant research the authors note:

“There is little debate among leadership scholars about the importance of intrapersonal abilities for the ongoing development of leaders….Empirical work in this area shows that individuals who continue being reflective in conditions of ambiguity and high emotion and who can manage their thoughts, feelings, and behavior — with the help of others — are able to access more developmental assignments at work and learn more from challenging development opportunities. [One study suggests] that leading well requires the emotional maturity to approach, and even sometimes provoke, anxiety-arousing situations to learn from them.”

The life narrative, the identity of the learner, begins to include rather than exclude the anxiety, seeing it as a valuable opportunity to grow rather than something to perpetually avoid. And aren’t the times precisely ones of “ambiguity and high emotion”? Don’t they require precisely this courage to experiment, to “provoke” situations in order to learn from them?

To use the metaphor of the Canyon, reflective leaders learn how to approach their inner edges. They become familiar with them, touching them in order to learn. They pay attention and find out where and how to step and, with others, learn to safely navigate where they are going without falling into denial and unconsciousness. The edges, of course, are where stuff comes up for all of us, and where we make the choice to either gain self-knowledge or try to wall out an uncomfortable sea of data or feelings, often by “externalizing” them in a way that makes them part of “the system” instead of exploring the sources of discomfort within.

It is really something to sit close to the edge of the Grand Canyon, no guardrails, just gravel and stone and then emptiness. It brings mortality into keener focus — the “life narrative.” One sits near the edge experiencing the energies of the earth and its temples, the sky and the sun. It’s no longer an intellectual or purely evaluative game. It’s the present and death is potentially only a few steps away. What then do you know of yourself that will carry you through the next moment, and the one after that?

Technorati Tags: Choices and Reflective Leadership
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Over the years I’ve worked with many leaders who say they want to improve their skills and develop as people. Yet, I’ve often watched them struggle when creating, and especially implementing any list of behavioral action steps. Personal change, it seems, suddenly becomes reduced to a set of chores.

We all know about habit, comfort zones and private fears, but those perspectives can add up to one great big message about personal development, that it is always hard work. Always a matter of “accountability,” a forced discipline more than a natural unfolding, in essence a grind it’s hard to put one’s heart into.

Yet, and this has also been the case, especially when I’ve watched clients over a longer period of time — and watched myself in the same way, too, I guess — the shifts people make through their growth over time don’t go against the natural style of their personality so much as they open up or “resolve” those styles. This happens in a way that the person naturally has more capability in exactly the places he or she would most like to grow. I think of one client, for example, who has gradually learned to become better at standing up for his own perspectives and desires. In the beginning, his style turned off people more powerful than himself and also led to some failures in his work and challenges in his family life. But over time he has learned to take a more comfortable, open approach to presenting himself, and he’s become much more successful as a result. He continues to learn what he wants to learn and it helps him move ahead in the arenas he most values.

In a corresponding way, I also think of a client or two whose natural patterns of growth caused them to lose or withdraw from their jobs because their most natural learning curves were directed away from being a good fit in their current roles. These were folks who were told they had to change in some way that wasn’t actually congruent with their inner desires. Issues like sole performer versus manager, aggressive environment versus a politic one were involved.

If we took the perspective that we do have a natural, internal learning curve, then it seems that we ought to pay more attention to that than simply pushing ourselves for adaptation that’s not likely to hold anyway. If I’m not passionate, not excited about the changes, not feeling they somehow complete me or fulfill me in some way, why would I do it? And what chance would the action steps have to actually stick?

We have to go to another level. We have to know how we want to grow, not how we should. If I’m a senior leader, for example, and I’ve gotten a ton of feedback about needing to be a better delegator, but I don’t feel any energy really to learn to delegate other than to avoid losing my job, is that going to be a worthwhile learning effort? If there’s a sense of threat involved, it may not be a question of “Can I learn it?” so much as “Is this really me?” Tough question!

Not too long ago, I learned about a program to help oncologists talk to their seriously ill patients in ways that are more empowering for the patient and more empathic. It’s a great program, and when I asked more about the underlying learning model, what I found out from the principals is that the learning they designed deeply couples specific behavioral protocols to the feedback the doctors themselves ask for and want. And then the program goes a step further, to help the physicians link this learning to more fundamental and personal reasons they personally chose the profession. In other words, what the doctors learn in the program is what they actually wanted to learn not what they have to learn, and they also learn how to anchor it in their sense of personal purpose and passion for the profession they are in. I think that’s a pretty good model that builds on a positive assumption about the learners’ intentions rather than a negative one that builds resistance — for both the learners and those who are “teaching.”

It also calls out a responsibility to be scrupulously honest with ourselves. If the learning we need does not actually correspond with the learning we want, perhaps it’s time to go take a good long look at where our own inner passions really are and to ask ourselves, what am I excited about? If the answer is that it isn’t this learning, then there’s a need to unearth the real curve, the desired one, and perhaps begin to make a shift in circumstances, such as a change to a new job or profession.

That may sound a bit cold or naive, especially in this economy, or at odds with today’s institutional realities, but I’d like to believe it also opens up a question of self-empowerment and choice, things that transform fear of leaving a comfort zone into excitement, the kind that makes a good life — and a good society — truly possible.

Technorati Tags: Choices
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