Last Friday night, beneath the lights on the Bowen island football pitch, my co-ed soccer league team won our Cup Final 5-0. We played the best team in the league for the Cup and although were prepared for a tight game. we were rather stunned with the result. What happened far exceeded our expectations of what was possible. We played unbelieveably well.
Football (I use the global term for “soccer” here) is a team game that is much like other team games in life. It features constrained action, bounded and with a purpose. It requires different people to perform different roles, sometimes at a distance from each other and it requires tremendous levels of improvisation to deal with the flow and constantly changing conditions. At the best of times it is an easy game to play but a hard game to play well, and it is an incredible game when your team plays out of its skin as we did on Friday. In my work life I work with some pretty good teams, especially with my friends in the Berkana Collaborative with whom I have tight and deep relationships. But playing on a football team for an hour or so gives one a clear and bounded sense of the possible, and I have been harvesting some of the key elements that went into making up my peak experience.
1. Train and learn together. It should go without saying that a team that does not train or learn together is not going to create an incredible experience right out of the box. A foundation of basic skills is essential. You have to know how to do the elementary things that you are being asked to do. None of us on the team are professionals, although some of us have had good coaching in the past. And because this is a recreational league we didn’t do much in the way of training together apart from on game days. But on game days we always arrived quite early and worked on skills, worked on patterns and ran some basic passing, shooting and team drills to get us in the mood for the game and to learn a little. Practicing and training together, in a positive spirit of encouragement and curiosity is a fundamental basis for good collaboration. We were never critical with each other, and always helped each other learn to do things we hadn’t been able to do before. In this way I think we all grew a little during the season.
2. Be friends. You are not going to perform anything near well if you don’t like each other. A case in point is this year French World Cup footbal team. A team of incredible invidiual talent, they ended up imploding, picking nfights with each other and going on strike with the result that they clattered out of the tournament’s early stages. When he was interview on CNN about what was wrong with the French team, German great Jurgen Klinnsman said simply “they don’t like each other.” You may think that being friends is a kind of kindergarten approach to getting things done but trying doing incredible work with people you dislike, distrust or haven’t forgiven. Good luck with that.
3. Have an obvious purpose. My friend Toke Moeller says that “purpose is the invisible leader.” So it is. On Friday our purpose was to win the game and the tournament. That was what we were there to do. We didn’t need a mission statement or a set of objectives. We had a simple set of measureables, the most obvious of which was the difference in goals scored. To acheive our purpose, we needed to score goals in their net and keep goals out of our net. But as clear as our purpose was, it would also be fair to say that we had a clear plan, although it was not a very precise one – it was rather based on principles. Basically we decided to attack on the wings, get past their midfield to where their defense was weakest and collapse our defenders on their forwards, denying them the centre of the field. Given these straightforward tactics, which were concrete and easy to remember, execution was easy. As a defender if I was playing too far outside, I could make a mental check in and move towards the middle. If my partner was passing the ball up the middle I could remind her to get it up the wings. We were able to adjust on the fly and feedback was welcome. We played dynamic football, but committed to our roles and responsibilities. We were able to be creative and supportive and flowing.
4. Communicate well and often. Football, like basketball and hockey and other flow sports, moves and changes quickly. Communication is essemtial. In fact it may have been the difference between our two teams on Friday night. We are chatty and talkative, communicating information to each other to alert players to threats, openings, available support, opportunities and options. Sometimes the communication is subtle – a hand waving to indicate that you are open – and other times it is panic laden and full of passion and roar. First and foremost it is clear and factual; second it is encouraging of stuff that is working; third it is helpful criticism to shift strategies or play a little differently.
5. Be aware of the whole field. This is another subtlety that separates good team from poor ones. In collaborative activities there is very little room for people to collapse their focus down on invididual needs. This awareness is a tricky thing to cultivate in an individualist culture, where we are rewarded for personal accomplishment. On Friday I was spending a lot of time tightly marking Team White’s striker, a tough playing and talented Brazilian named Gelson. For a lot of the match my focus was on him but the moment the ball was away from us, I could literally feel my awareness expand to contain the whole field. It helped me to be able to suggest options to our midfielders as I was seeing things unfold from my back line position. This total team awareness was perhaps the best indication that I was in a flow state all night.
6. Do your job and trust others to do theirs. Football is a great sport because you cannot do everything. The division of labour means that you have to focus on your job, figure out ways to connect to others and trust them to run with what you offer them. In football as in improv, the idea is to make your partners look good. A well weighted ball from the back helps midfielders chase it down the pitch. A good recovery from a rebound keeps your goalkeeper riding a clean sheet. On Friday I chose the job of marking Gelson, which meant that I was not going to be anywhere near the opposing team’s goal. No glory for me on the night except through the fact that we weren’t scored on. If I could keep Gelson and the other strikers from having any chance on goal, it would be easy for me trust our strikers to slot goals, and that was just what they did. It’s a relief not to have to do it all. It conserves energy, allows me to focus and takes advantage of the good relations we have.
7. Be generous. I think more than anything else on Friday night, I learned that football is a game of generosity. For the vast majority of the time, your job on a football pitch is to give and create. In the improv world we call this “making offers.” Generosity on the pitch means delivering useful passes, creating space by pulling your markers away from the action, helping support the play going forward by providing options so that we don’t give the ball away. In football, greedy players are vilified unless they are of the absolute highest talent. And even then, when they miss, especially when they had better options open, they are shunned. A shunned team member is impossible to play with and in fact becomes a liability as they create a hole on the pitch and bad feelings that pervade the relationships on the team. So generosity, gifting, creates the best teams. A gift economy of attention, resources, and opportunities creates the conditions for shared glory and accomplishment.
These little learnings are perhaps elementary, but think about how difficult they are to execute in daily life. In your organization, have you got these all right? Is there something you AREN’T doing? Are there elements of collaboration that you aren’t paying attention to? And what other lessons should we glean from peak flow experiences in collaboration and team work?
I’ve recently been introduced to the work of Al Nygard, a Native consultant working out of South Dakota primarily in Tribal communities. Al’s approach and values are very similar to my own, and it’s cool to see familiar ideas in another person’s hands. Al works with traditionally based models of leadership and calls his community development work “community empowerment.”
My colleague Jerry Nagel sent me a link to a video of Al answering the question of why it is so hard to get things done in Tribal communities. Essentially he identifies seven factors that make community empowerment unique. These seven factors bear out my own experience too. He calls these The Art of the Native View. If you understand this view, the work you do will take. If not, and if your work is built on mental models that don’t take these into consideration, you’re in trouble. In my own success and failures working in communities I can relate to how important it is to build your work on appropriate mental models, appropriate views. Even though Al identifies these seven factors as basically universal, each community has unique circumstances, cultures and histories that also inform the work of community empowerment. This stuff is interesting to me as I am about to embark on a project to work on community engagement and empowerment with my mates in the Berkananetwork, tailoring some of our resources to work in Tribal communities in North America
Starting around 5 minutes into the video, Al gets to the nub of his approach in building empowerment in Native communities. It centres around seven things that all Native communities share which make the work of empowerment unique. I’m summarizing and editorializing a little on his words here.
Trust. This is about building relationships of mutual reliance. It’s about building trust between people, between families and between people and institutions.
Communication systems. The default communication system in Indian country is the moccasin telegraph. Works fast but not always reliable. So we need a variety of ways to communicate – audio, visual, kinesthetic. Reliable commonly shared information is important and doing it in a multi-modal way is important.
Leadership systems. Who are the leaders in the community? Elected leaders, heads of entities and institutions yes, but what about moms, students, Elders, veterans? Leadership is everywhere. The system that develops and directs leadership in all these ways is important. Elections are clear but how are we developing leaders in other areas and how do we get information to leaders so they can act? Leadership in Native communities comes from invitation: you are asked to be a leader. Also, there is an end time. When it’s over, it’s over. In Anglo cultures we seek out leadership and then we hang on to it as long as possible. To me this is one of the reasons why Open Space is such an interesting fit for traditional leadership forums, as these are the same dynamics that underlie that process.
Governance. What are the rules that tell us what we can depend on? Not the same as government. Do your rules help you or hold you back? That is the essence of governance
Lateral oppression. Sometimes called the Indian crab syndrome (in a bucket of crabs, when one tries to escape the others will pull it back down). Lateral oppression is the way that power shows up in shadow in a community. When you are working with empowerment, the shadow work of paying attention to lateral oppression is very important.
Racism and Inequality. A common experience of all Native people living in community is the disparity of experience on the rez vs. off the rez. Over time, experiences of oppression, racism and inequality eat away at self-esteem and colour how we relate to the outside world. Just this evening in a cafe I was running this dynamic showed up as a difference between how a First Nations forest company and non-First Nations forest companies dealt with the stress of uncertainty about the future.
Hurt and Balance. The lingering effects of trauma from issues like residential school abuse, language and culture decline, and the subsequent multi-generational issues create a myriad complex of dynamics that often confuse and confound outsiders.
Al’s framework is a useful lens to view work in Tribal communities. Mental models and world views matter.
Silo busting is a very interesting thing. Everyone knows that systems atrophy when they divide their work into silos. Silos entrench difference and prevent learning across sectors whether we are talking about departments in an organization, or a social system like health care or child and family services.
Silos have limited usefulness. They divide work into manageable chunks. But in general they create reductionist responses to systemic problems and they pose a massive challenge to people working nfor change. If we first have to bust the silos, and only then can we address the problems, how do we know we’ll have energy left for the real work?
So let’s be real. Dr. Rob Anda, who I met this week in Seattle, had a great line when talking about reducing the effects of adverse childhood experiences. “I don’t see silos as disappearing anytime soon, but if we work together in community from common information sources we can make change.”
Great line. Forget about the silos. Bring people together in communities of practice to learn about the information they need and that serves their common purpose, and then engage in the conversations that build network and community around learning about change and enacting solutions that make sense at the community level. Bottom up silo busting. Forget about the structural reforms first. Do the work first and then institutionalize the solutions that work across sectors, disciplines and other silos. Follow the Theory U process: concretize solutions following social prototyping.
And when the silos – the funders, the government agencies, the power brokers and decision makers – come looking for evidence and evaluation, use Developmental Evaluation to tell the story of what is going on across the system.
Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
Lovely report here on the use of the Art of Hosting apaproach, Theory U and others of our social technologies in health care renewal in Nova Scotia.
Within the report is a lovely little quote from My dear friend Toke Moeller: “Purpose is the invisible leader.”
Given some of the work I’m doing in the next couple of weeks, that is a very good motto for me.