John Watters, Guest Contributor
Dear Barry and Adam,
I know you have been in dialogue on the subject of Power + Love over the last year. I have some reflections I wanted to share with you both which are triggered in part by the annual BBC Reith Lectures, the last of which, A New Politics of the Common Good, is delivered on 30 June by Mark Sandell, a political philosopher at the Harvard School of Government.
People talk about the importance of grand or meta-narratives- those that frame our understanding of ourselves, what reality is and what is possible. Robert Kegan at the Harvard School of Education makes a convincing case that we create our world in language and presumably also story. The dominant story/narrative in my view in our world and in our organisations is one of powerlessness. Jonathan Sachs (Britain’s Chief Rabbi) says “the greatest danger facing Western societies is powerlessness, of a world running out of control, of problems too great to solve and hatred too deep to cure”. Adam, your work using the Change Lab process is a stand for a belief that we can co-create collective processes where we can resolve our most intractable problems peacefully. As you said at the Shambhala Authentic Leadership Institute in Canada last year there is an urgency to show this approach works in a world where fear, cynicism, and hopelessness are prevalent. Barry, your notion of ‘Door B’ choices - being a stand, personally and as a group or team, for a different future is also an antidote to this dominant sense of powerlessness and futility.
We are between stories – in that anxiety-provoking place of no trustworthy shared narrative people can believe in. In the UK recently our political classes have been shown to be flawed following an explosive expenses scandals in the last few months. The press and much of the public have been angry, shocked and engaged wholeheartedly in “blaming them.” This follows breakdowns in trust in our leaders in other institutions, for example the Catholic Church in Ireland and the U.S. with its child abuse scandals. This serves to diminish the pool of trust in all formal leaders. Thank goodness some might say that we may be in the last days of the ‘great man’ view of leaders, or as Barry might say the ‘great top’ view of leadership, which leaves others in a place of irresponsibility and blaming them when they inevitably fall short of our projected ideals.
Sandell in his Reith Lectures argues that “we have come to the end of the era of market triumphalism.” Many of us bought the idea that self-interested action by consumers (individuation in Barry’s language mediated by the market) would produce a common good. We now see what great human cost and environmental destruction this flawed idea, which was held as an unassailable truth for so long, has led to. Hence the topicality of the Reith Lectures and the question of how to create ‘A New Politics of the Common Good’.
Many of our lives do seem to be fragmented. Barry talks of the dominance of the middle space – “it’s middle all the way up in the New York skyscrapers offices” he once joked. The middle space engenders what he calls the ‘I’ mentality – a feeling of being unique, separate, competitive with and evaluative of others. We think this is real – this is how the world is – rather than that this feeling is a function of our reflexive behavior in the condition of a diffusing middle space. Other possibilities exist but we need to wake up and see the systemic nature of the worlds we live in and create new possibilities rather than just the familiar old story. This feeling of disconnection is made worse by a dominant narrative that defines our identity as primarily individual consumers rather than citizens living in communities on a small planet. Newtonian thinking still runs deep and continues to be a powerful, shaper of our consciousness - seeing ourselves as atomised individuals in an empty universe. All these phenomena conflate together to provide the lens through which we tend to see, experience and create the world.
In the face of this story many of us have turned inwards in an attempt to create safe space, a haven in a heartless world. So is the world heartless, is it characterised by the absence of love?
In our 24 hour news channel era it is hard to underestimate the impact of the continuous reels of stories of a heartless world. Subtly, steadily we begin to believe this is the reality and act in the light of that reality to withdraw and protect ourselves. “I don’t want you to put the news on”, my ten year old son said recently. “I know what it will say – someone stabbed someone, there is a war in this country, blah blah, blah”. I think he didn’t want that to be the only definition of his reality.
Both of you through your different work offer ways to reconnect with the whole – whether that is the family system, community, organisation, complex stakeholder group, nation …. This requires a healing of the fractures, seeing the possibility of a renewal of the whole in the all too evident fragments. It requires an understanding of the elements of what Barry describes as a ‘systems power move’ – belief we can make a difference, deep systems knowledge that informs us how and when to intervene, and the courage to act. Acting is critical: “vision without execution is hallucination” as someone once said.
Our calling in this period of transition where “the ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation” is to create a new narrative which discovers anew and showsthe possibilities of the generative sides of power and love, rather than their too familiar degenerative sides. Of course we are all in this transition too. I know I am as often as much a part of the problem as its solution. Courage, humility and a sense of humour seem important and useful travelling companions at the moment.
Our first step is to sort ourselves out – to be agents of hope in the world, to reach for Door B, to take the road less travelled. I agree with Marianne Williamson that we are much more powerful and influential than our stories about ourselves have allowed. “Improvement starts with I” said Arnold Glasow. In slightly longer form Confucius apparently said: “To put the world in order, we must put the nation in order; to put the nation in order we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”
Best regards
John Watters, guest contributor
john.watters@livingleadership.uk.com
There's some really good stuff in there. I can't help but wonder how you might be able to deploy your work into the civic, social or political arena to influence the influencers and leaders in our communities and nations. Because of the fundamental issues you point to, wouldn't major foundations consider the work you do as a great tool to enable the effectiveness of the funding they put in place to make a difference in this world? Just a thought.
Posted by: tilly pick | October 06, 2009 at 12:47 PM