in most of our leadership training work and our strategic work with Harvest Moon, we devote at least a half day to working with limiting beleifs using a process developed by Byron Katie called simply The Work.
At its simplest, the work is a process of inquiring into limiting beliefs that are unhelpful in our work and lives. Such beliefs often include judgements, ideologies and other beliefs that prevent us from really seeing the reality we are dealing with. Some of these beliefs are so strong that we take them for granted – such as “Richard shouldn’t have punched Eric” which is an excellent example of an espoused belief that crumbles in the face of the reality that Eric was just punched by Richard. As anyone with teenagers knows, just saying something “should” or “shouldn’t” happen is no guarantee that it will or won’t, and is an utter denial of what just did happen (or didn’t!). Any statement that contains “should” is an argument with reality.
Every time we enter into complexity work with clients we confront limiting beliefs: this won’t work, we’ve already tried it, it’s impossible, the boss will kill it, we don’t know what to do, the answer has to be clear, and so on. Limiting beliefs do a couple of things. First they limit thinking by exerting a powerful constraint over the mind that, left unquestioned, makes us narrow our ability to scan of possibilities. And second, they cognitively entrain our thinking with unhelful attractors, so that when the boss enters the room, so do all our thoughts about the boss’s resourcefulness and support. Doing creative work with unquestioned beliefes in the way is near impossible.
The way to deal with this kind of thinking is, not surprisingly, informed by complexity practice. So this means that it won’t work to ask a direct question about that belief. Addressing situations head on is a good strategy for complicated problems but a poor strategy for complex ones. And entrained brains will always game the system. In practice this misapplication looks like adopting an affirmation or something like “I will be kinder towards my boss” that doesn’t shift thinking at all, and in fact can bury the resent and anger directed at the boss that will come out in some passive aggressive .form when you least expect it or least desire it.
instead we inquire into the the thought by looking at how a belief lines up with reality, and then looking at what happens when we are believing thoughts – how our body, emotions and behaviours are influenced when a belief is active in our mind. From there we engage in a powerful set of exercises called “turnarounds” in which we investigate beliefs from different angles. After that, we simply sit and let the mind settle. there is no action plan. We are not fixing problems, we are rewiring our cognition. It’s a simple practice, but it works because we take an oblique approach to addressing the constraints, attractors and solidified identities that limit our ability to do good work in complex and uncertain environments.
It has been very cool developing this practice with my partner Caitlin Frost who is a master facilitator and teacher of this work. As I have been exploring the world of complexity-based design, I have been seeing more and more how this process is a strong complexity-based approach to addressed constraints and cognitive entrainment in our thinking. It’s a key piece of strategic capacity building.
When you make your living in the world as a facilitator, you can’t help but notice the quality of conversation that surrounds you. People come up to me all the time asking advice about how to have this or that chat with colleagues or loved ones. Folks download on me their grief that our civic conversations have been polluted by rudeness and the inability to listen. We feel an overall malaise that somehow our organizations or communities could be doing better.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— TS Eliot
Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America. Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working at scale have begun to outline a form and practice of leadership that is needed in much of our work now.
Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene. It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption. So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.
This week I have been a part of a series of meetings, gatherings and workshops around the release of a new book on Dialogic Organizational Development. I contributed a chapter to the book on hosting containers.
Yesterday, the lead authors hosted a day long conference on the themes contained in the book and we delivered some workshops and hosted some dialogue on the emergence of this term and the implications for the field. Today we are at the Academy of Management conference being held in Vancouver where the lead authors, and some of the rest of us, are delivering a professional development workshop.
Over the past few days I’ve been reflecting on relationships between practitioners and academics, especially as it pertains to the development of learning and innovation in this field. Traditionally, academics are suspicious of practitioners who fly by the seat of their pants, who don’t ground their experience in theory and who tell stories that validate their biases. Practitioners are traditionally suspicious of academics being stuffy, jargony and inaccessible, too much in the mind and engaged in indulgent personal research projects. Secretly I think, each has been jealous of the other a bit: academics coveting the freedom of practice and practitioners wanting the legitimacy of academics.
One of the things I like about this new book is that Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak brought together people from both fields to write the book. Gervase is really clear that the role of researchers in this work is to help practitioners understand why things work. This is a really welcome invitation as I have been working for a year or more led by Dave Snowden’s exhortation to us in the practitioner field to “understand why things work before you repeat them.” For practitioners it is important to engage with theory. If you don’t, you miss out on a tremendous amount of generative material that will make you a better designer and a better practitioner.
I am now interested in bleeding these distinctions between academics and practitioners and I think we both need to do this. I think we are discovering that these days, practice is the fastest way to advance the field. In fact we find researchers now trailing along behind practitioners sifting through the mess we leave when we do projects willy nilly, whether well planned or delivered based on a gut instinct. Our practice evolves quickly because we only need work to be “good enough” in order to use it as a platform for further development. We publish stories and learning instantaneously on our blogs and face book pages and listervs and twitter feeds. Once academics get their hands on the data and take the time to analyze it and publish it, the practice field has moved quickly and may have evolved in ways that the academic conversation has been unable to anticipate.
For practitioners though it’s worth pausing from time to to time and working with the people that are trying to tell you what you are doing. There is a tremendoous body of theory in philosophy, neurology, cognitive science, anthropology, and the natural sciences that is directly applicable to our field. I find that many practitioners have one or two blind spots or reactions to theory: they dismiss it as too dense to get, they borrow it badly (usually as a metaphor, such as quantum physics being misused to talk about intention and influence) or they dive it. I have been guilty of these in the past, and these days I’m trying to embrace theory much more deeply and work with researchers who are studying our field including folks like Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles, Elizabeth Hunt and Trevor Maber, just to name a few recent ones. I invite you to do the same.