Hope

Today, I can think of nothing better than to simply share Howard Zinn's wonderful words on hope - a reminder for those days which seem dark, despairing, and robbed of possibility:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness… And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

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Asleep

Overheard in a conversation with one of the most senior leaders of a huge international organisation:"I have no time to do what I think is really important, because I have so many meetings to go to".When are we going to say no to this?Somehow, we've committed millions of ourselves to a colossal waste of human time and ingenuity by allowing ourselves to think - even for a moment -  that this is an acceptable way to go about things in a world where so much urgently needs doing.

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Could you live there?

A question to those who are leaders or in positions of authority:

If your organisation was a town or city would you want to live there?

Could you tolerate what you're apparently prepared to tolerate at work?

Could you live with neighbours who treat each other the way people at work treat each other?

Be such a neighbour yourself?

Could you?

And for those whose answer is 'no':

Can you see that your organisation is inescapably a part of society, shaping the world we all get to live in? That in this way it's much more like a town than it appears? That you're actively involved in creating it?

That you're living there already?

Can you see that our world is affected when you allow or participate in manipulation and self-justification?... when you allow fear to stop people from telling the truth?... and when you don't tell the truth yourself?... when you hold so much of yourself back?... and support others in doing the same?... when you treat people as resources rather than as human beings?... when you pretend everything is ok when it's not?... when you fail to speak out about what you see?

Or have you convinced yourself that the way you lead your organisation has no consequence for your own life or for the rest of us?

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Growing up

We think that we're grown up just because we've hit adulthood, or because we've taken on a position of leadershipBut so many of us are still looking for parents who can save us from life's difficulty, or who can tell us we're doing ok.As long as we're looking for parents, we expect the leaders of our organisations to know what to do, to tell us what's needed, and to rescue us. We hold back from speaking truth, because we're scared they'll judge us or reject us. When we don't see change coming we blame them for sticking to their rigid parental ways. And, when things don't turn out the way we want them, we blame them for failing us, instead of stepping up and taking action ourselves. We give up our capacity for independent action so we can keep ourselves in a dependent, child-like role.All of this is happening even at the most senior levels of multi-national organisations, because - it turns out - being senior and being grown up are not the same thing. It explains much about why change can be so difficult, and why so many of us hold back from solving the problems we see around us.And it makes the ongoing task of adult development so critical for each of us and our organisations. Because it's the challenging work of growing up so that we can genuinely be adults in the world - without relying on a saviour - that allows us to take collective responsibility first for our institutions, and for our society as a whole.

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Making it urgent

When what you want others to do isn't happening as fast as you'd like, it's tempting to up the pressure by making everything urgent, even when it's not.This might work for a little while, but you're solving your difficulty in the wrong place.Making everything urgent is like crying wolf. Before long nobody will believe your deadlines, and you'll be back where you started, only now you've eroded the very trust that makes coordinating action with others possible.And you've made it more difficult for people to join you in a much more important conversation about what each of you is genuinely committed to, how your commitments compete with one another, and what you're willing to put down to have what you care about happen.

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Meeting the gatekeeper

In a famous story by Franz Kafka, a man who is searching for truth comes to a door, guarded by a powerful gatekeeper.The two talk for a while, and the man discovers that what he seeks is within. But when he realises that this is only the first in a series of doors guarded by successively fierce and powerful gatekeepers, he decides to sit for a while and work out how he can obtain permission to enter.The man sits, and he sits, occasionally striking up conversation with the gatekeeper, and the years pass. The man wonders what it will be like to eventually cross through the door, and why nobody else seems to have come by to gain entry.And as the man finally reaches the end of his life - still waiting - the gatekeeper reaches out for the door. This door, he tells the man, was only for you, and now it is time for me to close it, for ever.So much of our lives is exactly this way. Faced with a threshold to cross - as happens to each of us innumerable times - we easily hesitate. Waiting on the known side of the door feels so much better, and so much safer, for who knows what succession of trials and dangers awaits on the other side?There, we will have to face our anxiety and fear, and an uncertain world in which much that we've come to rely on can no longer save us.And while we know that our chances of living fully are much greater if we're prepared to step in, we can see only how our lives would be safer staying just where we are, where the reassuring contours of the world as we know it can hold us.And eventually, each of the doors in our life closes, as we knew they always would, and we find out that the safety of staying small, and quiet, and not bothering anyone - the safety of holding the horizons of the world tight and enclosing - was never any genuine safety at all.

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Letting the sadness in

Today, with thanks to the wonderful work of the team at On Being, something short to watch.I've written before about the numbing effect of technology, how we can use it to avoid contact with ourselves and others, and the far-reaching consequences of all this.Here, Louis CK talks powerfully, and with a glorious lightness, about technology and our dangerous flight from our sadness and loneliness.What, he asks, if we put down our phones and started letting the sadness in?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c

Both sides

In the ancient Jewish tradition, people are thought of as having two primary orientations to the world - an inclination towards good (yetzer hatov) and an inclination towards evil (yetzer harah).The inclination towards good draws us out of ourselves towards what is most compassionate and most principled. And the inclination towards evil draws us towards our most self-centred interests, from which we care only for ourselves and not for others or the world.Surely, in this way of thinking, the inclination towards good is itself good and should be cultivated, and the inclination towards evil is bad and should be extinguished? No, say the rabbis, they are both good, and both necessary.How can this be?With only the inclination to good we risk spending all our time basking in the wonder and awe of life. Many possibilities for action are denied to us, because they cannot be known to have positive outcomes. The inclination to good, on its own, is noble but paralysed, unable to decide what to do when uncertain about consequences, when the world in all its complexity and unknowability becomes apparent.And so we need the inclination to evil also. Given free rein, it dooms us to a life of self-centredness, of action purely for our own gain. But without it, say the rabbis, nobody would create anything. We would not build houses, bring children into the world, nor do the difficult and creative work of shaping the world around us. The inclination to evil, with its indignation and rage and cunning and huge creativity is what brings us into purposeful action.Denying either side leads to trouble. It takes both inclinations in a constant dynamic tension to have us act in the most human, and most humane ways.And this is the foundational task facing each of us if we want to act with integrity in the world: we must find a way of knowing ourselves fully so that we leave nothing of ourselves out. We have to stop denying and pushing away the parts of ourselves that we don't understand, or don't like so much. We have to take our fear and confusion as seriously as our hope and our joy. We have to stop pretending to have it all together.Integrity is exactly that - integrating all of it. When we bring our hope and our fear, our nobility and selfishness, our love and our disdain, our serious adulthood and playful childishness, our light and our darkness, each informs and shapes the other in a constant dance of opposites. And this is what brings us into creative and purposeful and appropriate action in the complexity of the world.

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Because we won't talk about it

We've made emotions, the inner critic, and what we feel in our bodies undiscussable in most organisations, perhaps especially for those with the most power and hence the most to lose (see this post for more).And the effects are far-reaching.Because without an honest conversation about our fear and vulnerability, and in the midst of the myth of the heroic, independently capable leader, we've rendered ourselves mute on one of the most important conversations we could be having: our first-hand account of what makes it so difficult, so often, to tell the truth. And what could help us.We become united in our silence.The consequences go far beyond momentary inconvenience, or the conversation you're avoiding about a colleague's performance. Because when we're unable to tell truth, and tolerate doing so however it feels, we turn away from each other and from our capacity to act.In the spaces left by our silence, the seeds of great difficulty can grow, unrestrained - the seeds of organisational malpractice, self-interest, and denial. And soon, they grow in our society too, even though many of us have forgotten that our work and society are not separate from one another.How many more economic, ethical, and environmental crises are we willing to have our organisations be part of? How long before we discover our urgent need to turn to one another about all this, and speak up about what we see in ourselves that has us hold back?

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Up close

The image you carry around with you of each person you know is not that person.And the image you carry around with you of yourself is not you.So often, when you relate to others, you're relating only to the image - a story, a narrative thread woven from glimpses, half-truths, and your own habitual way of accounting for things. You can hardly call it them. If anything, what you're relating to is more properly part of you. How huge the distance there is still to cross to have any real sense of the other.And yet... this capacity to relax your certainty about other people so you can reach them and be reached is one of the great human qualities, if you're prepared to allow for it. And if you're ready to find out that, up close, other people are quite different from what you were sure they would be.

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