Category: collaboration

From the Drafts: Felt Accountability

Notes about accountability on a flip chart: behaviors, bureaucracy, organizing and sharing

From the draft archives, 2012. This post from Bob Sutton came out of his frustrations with an airline, and led him to consider factors of felt accountability. I loved rereading his post as it spoke to this time of strong individualism here in the US. Do we have any felt accountability? I’ve snipped in the four aspects of felt accountability, but go read the post!

Felt Accountability: Some Emerging Thoughts – Bob Sutton.

Authorship…  That feeling that not only am I obligated to do the right thing, but that I am the person responsible for designing and making it as great as I can…

Mutual Obligation…David Novak, CEO of Yum! brands, argues that this should be the goal of a great leader, to create a place where it feels like you own it and it owns you.   …there is palpable weight on people, they feel pressure to do the right thing even when no one is looking, as the old saying goes. And they pressure others to do so as well.   

Indifference…Think of the average hair salon, where each stylist rents a chair.  Or a group dental practice, where dentists share a common receptionist and a few services and little else. Some organizations are designed this way and can be quite effective. The mutual dependence is weak, it is a “we don’t do much for you, so you don’t have to do much for us” situation.   

Mutual  Contempt… everyone seems to despise everyone else.  I hope I am wrong about this, but the awful stories rolled in from so many sources that it seems as if all the years of cost-cutting, all the battles with unions, all the management changes, all the stress that customers have endured over the years have conspired to bring the organization — at least most it — to this dark place.  

From Control to Free Floating Reverie

Fresh Post! No Archive redraft!

Johnnie Moore pointed to a great LinkedIn post by Laurence Barrett that resonates with my current “fallow” project. It is no accident that Johnnie is an advocate of “unhurried!”

Laying fallow, I can reflect, observe and cross-pollinate ideas and experiences that surround me because I have the free time and head/heart space to do that. I am not fully confined by a large set of obligations. Yes, the grandkids are still #1 priority and that is a place for much of my energy, but the freedom from deliverables is quite intoxicating. I am available for reverie!

I’m pulling out two quotes, but it will make much more sense if you go and read the whole post! And don’t miss the P.S. at the bottom, which is fodder for even more reflection and blogging!

Mr. Barrett is talking in the context of coaching and the dynamic of “containment.” When I read it, I immediately thought about how a facilitator may try and contain human interaction in the well-intentioned service of the goal or purpose of a gathering. As group process folks, we have the opportunity (motive! means!) to create containers where people might do something different and more effective if engaged in something more free floating than overly structured.

The older I get, the more I sense that a lot of group process practices are about how we actually make a space less welcoming, “safe,” etc. Instead, Barrett reflects on another way that is less contained, and more “free floating.”

Here we may think of it as a dynamic, mutual and rather messy process of meaning making. Images and associations arise from the unconscious to be exchanged and evolved in what Wilfred Bion termed a ‘reverie’; a free-floating dialogue without defined goals and objectives.

In reverie both coach and client are ‘in’ and committed to the dialogue. Both can potentially be transformed.

And…

If our need to be ‘masterful’ or ‘powerful’ (words I see in some coach training) prevents us from entering a reverie we do not contain our clients, we just limit them.

A client is contained not by the coaches calm, rational, objectivity, but by our engagement and involvement, and both parties may be transformed by the encounter.

Pretending we are wisdom figures may fuel our narcissism or hide our anxiety, but it is definitely not containment.

I have worked hard through my professional life to show up not as some sort of wisdom figure and to engage in reciprocal work and learning. But there are old patterns in there that creep up in my head saying “I know what to do here.” Fully recognizing those moments, and choosing to let go, is something quite wonderful. And a door to reverie. (Using a “door” metaphor also reminds us there are many ways to think about space and containers. See this wonderful piece about other ways to think of space.

P.S. I love the four fundamental principles Mr. Barrett’s company espouses. I love them so much I took a screen shot. Mr. Barrett, if that is not OK, let me know and I’ll take the image down!

Image of four principles of Heresy Consulting. Each has an image, then the words underneath including: All change is a step into the unknown, Only through difference can we learn, Leadership is an expression of the soul, and We are made through our relationships.
The four principles of Heresy Consulting https://www.heresyconsulting.com/

From the Archives: Tom Atlee – Responding deeper than symptoms

Four quadrants of a Critical Uncertainties exercise in multiple colored pen written on a white flip chart.

The blog link for this amazing quote from 2011 is dead, but Tom Atlee (Co-Intelligence Institute) continues his amazing work (you can support the Institute here.)

As I reflect on the quote, I think of the current high level of polarity that we so often seem to want to ignore, gloss over of simply avoid by not interacting with those who believe differently than we do. If we just focus on symptoms, we just make it worse. See a few ideas below the quote…

Just because some energy or activity ceases to be clearly and publicly visible, doesn’t mean it has died or gone away. Especially when you suppress it with violence, you almost guarantee it will continue, growing and evolving, surfacing with new energy and impacts in new times and places, often to people’s great surprise. Addressing symptoms of a disturbance seldom handles the cause, which will soon find other outlets to manifest whatever need is not being met.

Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute

I appreciate a few of the Liberating Structures that help us step past our assumptions (the place of just focusing on symptoms and not causes?) such as Critical Uncertainties, Agreement Certainty Matrix and Ecocycle. When we offload some of the posturing and judgement and give some space for sense making, we can get closer to cause.

via What happens now with OWS? – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge.

From the Archives: Nice Attention Assessment Activity

Many colored post its with tiny, illegibile writing on them.

These 2011 tips on assessing attention in an online learning context could work for any of our Zoom/Teams meetings now a days. It reminds me of the red-green-yellow cards that Jerry Michalski used to use at his F2F retreats. (Green – keep going, Red – Stop, enough! Yellow – I have a question). I’m going to try this next online meeting I host!

Howard has been working with his students on something that he calls “Infotention” (yup!  there’s another one!) – developing your attention skills, training your attention span, and learning how to use IT skills (RSS feeds, persistent news search, and dashboards) to support your attention. As Howard put it, it’s critical to use the information that’s flowing into you in a way that allows you to make faster and better decisions.  Asking yourself, for example…Ignore or attend? Open a tab for later? What are the right spatial arrangements (highest priority on the left, most frequently updated is on the top).  He tries to help his students match their attention to the tool set, to start small and cultivate habits. He also cautions that there are days we must recognize that we need to get something specific done and therefore must be mindful of how your attention is spent.  Set a goal and then regularly, through the day, ask yourself, is what I am doing now bringing me closer to my goal for the day?

He described an interesting (very low tech) activity he does with his students using  yellow, orange and red post-it notes.  A gong goes off at irregular intervals and, at that point, students write down what they were thinking about on the appropriate colored post-it notes.  Yellow if the thought was on task, orange if it tangential to the task at hand, and red if it was off task. The post-its get assembled in a common spot on the board (this could be done online as well) so that the entire class can track its collective “infotention”.

via Meeting Howard Rheingold « virtualworldnmfsfall11.

Someday again? Random Act of Culture

Monday Video: From the draft archives.

In our divided, socially distanced times, it is both refreshing and poignant seeing this video from 2010. We are in a different world. So I’m here, singing to you, even though you can’t hear me.

via YouTube – Opera Company of Philadelphia “Hallelujah!” Random Act of Culture.