Brighter than the sun

This week, to mark the first anniversary of this project, I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working.This is from September 2013.--

Sometimes, in the midst of all our striving, longing, and reaching, our building of towers and the making of names for ourselves, it's important to remember that one day we will, with certainty, lose it all.Some of this will happen piece by piece. We'll gradually say goodbye to people as they leave life. We'll realise, perhaps suddenly, that their presence in the world touched our hearts and lit up our eyes. We'll find out that their worth is beyond words.And for all of us, the loss will also come entirely at once - maybe at a time when we least expect it, before we can even know it's happening - when it is 'I' who is leaving and it is others who have to say goodbye.Some of us take a long time to find all this out, holding our inner gifts back from the world until we're sure the time is just right - a time that may never come.But others seem to live with this understanding so fully in their hearts it's as if nothing is withheld. They've discovered that the point of life is life itself, and that each of us is simply another expression of life's beauty and wonder. And from this understanding flows their kindness, their generosity and their wisdom, so that they shine brighter than the sun.

For Christy

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Business and personal

This week, to mark the first anniversary of this project, I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working.This is from August 2013.--

Many business difficulties are, at root, personal difficulties...

... conversations we're not bold enough to have, motives we hide and dress up as reason, emotions we don't know how to deal with, resentments we fuel, imagination constrained by blame and the fear of shame, judgements of people who are different from us, fear and anxiety we won't name, scapegoating, saving face, projections of what's in our shadow, self-pity, self-aggrandisement.But we've convinced ourselves (since the start of the industrial age) that businesses are machines rather than collections of people. It conveniently leads us to try to engineer our way out of difficulty - a detached move that saves us from having to own up to our own part in what's going on.And so when faced with what seems unsolvable, we turn to

restructures (a recurring favourite)competency frameworksmergers and acquisitionsleadership frameworksthe latest update to company policychanging what's measuredcharts of acceptable behaviourstraining programmes

rather than do the apparently more difficult, more unpredictable, more messy work of turning to one another with sincerity and curiosity, and being truthful about what's going on.So many difficulties can be solved by talking about what's happening, both within us and between us. But mostly we allow ourselves to take up the convenient story that this is irrelevant to business, out of place at work.We even call it 'soft'.Addressing the personal, emotional, relational part of our business difficulties is anything but soft. It's the hardest, most important, most rewarding and most practical problem solving arena of all.

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More more more

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from July 2013.--

We've built our culture on the premise that more is always better. That there's no such thing as enough.We think we'd be better off we had more time, more money, a bigger house, a nicer car, the latest fashion, the newest smartphone, a bigger job, more market share, more efficiency. We construct our lives around this premise and we construct our organisations, institutions, and politics around it too. It's endemic.We've even gone as far as to relabel ourselves in this fashion. We're no longer people but consumers. Without acknowledging how demeaning it is to be understood as yawning open mouths sated only by the arrival of more stuff, companies and politicians refer to us in this way - and we take it. Once upon a time we used to be citizens, but you'll have to listen hard to hear that in our public discourse these days.All of this 'more' seems so obvious, and so unquestionable, we can't see what it's doing to us. We can't see the way it has us relate to the whole of life as if there were not enough. Not enough time, not enough space, not enough shiny things, not enough holidays, not enough growth, not enough experiences. We can't see how it has us hoard our possessions such that many of us have way more than we require, while others cannot meet their basic needs. We can't see how it has us work like machines, ignoring our families, our loved ones, our friends, our relationship with nature, with art, with stillness, with beauty. We can't see how our obsession with more fuels the degradation of the environment in which we live, and of the bodies that support us. We can't see how our sense of lack, even when all our basic needs are more than fulfilled, eats away at our lives and our experience of living.If you look closely at life, you'll find that once you've satisfied your basic, most essential needs, acquiring more on its own rarely - if ever - produces the fulfilment and feeling of safety you've been longing for. Or if it does, it doesn't last for very long, replaced as it is by a gnawing anxiety that what you now have still isn't enough.Only when you start to see the hollowness of the 'more' narrative we're all living in can you also begin to see what's genuinely satisfying. Deep, truthful, courageous relationships. Community. Seeing and being seen. Serving others wholeheartedly, and accepting the gifts of others' service. Finding your voice, your unique contribution, and bringing it. Curiosity and wonder. Being part of a commitment bigger than yourself. Slowing down enough to be present in life rather than ever absent from it.The best question to ask yourself when you are caught up in the spiral of more is 'for the sake of what?'. If your only answer is 'so I can have more' or 'because I want it' you'd better ask again. Perhaps you'll find a genuine, honest answer why more is necessary. But if you can't find one perhaps it's time to turn away from what you're so sure you must have, and into life itself.

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So much to do

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from June 2013.
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When you're overwhelmed it's easy to blame how much you have to do on others. Yes, your boss, your colleagues, your customers and the state of the world all probably have something to do with it.But maybe it's time you started to look at your own part in your situation.The first question to ask is whether you're paying attention to what's important or are trying to do everything. Developing your capacity to discriminate, to determine what actually makes a difference and what's peripheral is foundational here. And it's often not so easy to tell. So you may have to observe the effect of your actions over time and talk to people who are affected by the fruits of your work as you learn the discernment you need.But, please, don't stop there. Because the way you take on every possibility that comes your way is born of the story you have of what it is to be a person, and what it is to work. You might be working at being:

a noble hero: able to take on all difficulties, courageously keeping everything under control, ensuring everybody sees your unassailable strength, never letting on the difficulty you're experiencing

the saviour: the only one who can do this. "I couldn't possibly put anything down... they need me"

a martyr: trying to hold the burdens of the world, keeping everyone from harm, sacrificing yourself by scooping up all that needs to be done

Each of these identities will be doing something for you that you value. They can play a powerful role in generating self-esteem, giving you a place in an uncertain world, and defending you from shame and embarrassment. It may well be the case that your colleagues are playing similar roles too, or playing their part by working to have you to stay in yours.But each of them makes the space for discrimination very small indeed, and the possibility of putting anything down smaller still, because they call on you to push harder, go faster, and for longer in the face of difficulty.Each adds to your suffering by promising that resolution will come soon: that if you're strong enough, persistent enough, fast enough, sacrifice enough then eventually the world will stop making demands of you.Usually, it's the opposite that's the case. The world will not stop with its demands, and pushing on relentlessly until it does leads eventually to exhaustion and resentment.It's time you started catching on to the way the identity you have taken up is part of the very difficulty that's breaking you. If you weren't a hero or martyr or saviour, who else could you be? 

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Not really my life

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from May 2013.–

"This is not really my life," you say. "I'm just getting ready."You'll be ready to live properly, you tell me, in earnest, only when

You get promotedYou find the perfect partnerYou make some moneyPeople appreciate youYou have it all worked outThe children leave homeYou get discoveredYou find happinessYou sell the companyYou're not so confusedYou live in your dream houseYou feel peacefulYou become famousYou find out what you're meant to do

You've been taught to live this way by happy-ever-after fairy tales, celebrity fantasies and by believing that there's some step which will take away your suffering, clear up your uncertainty, allow you to settle at last. So you've continually postponed fully inhabiting your life, because every goal reached reveals to you how lost you still are and how much further there is to go.Living in a suspended state saves you from coming into contact with the fierceness and love and immediacy of living. You learn to settle with life lived at a distance, a perpetual watching and waiting for the answer that will free you.What if you gave up the idea that anything or anyone can relieve you from your longing and from your confusion? What then? You'd have no choice but to throw yourself headlong, passionately into your life. Or maybe to allow life to sweep you off your feet. And who knows what might come from that?

Photograph by Justin Wise

Holding on for dear life

For the next few days I am republishing favourite posts from each month of the first year of On Living and Working. This is from April 2013.

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Anxiety and fear are not the same.If you're walking along a cliff-top path, fear is to do with what might happen if you slip and fall. It has to do with consequence.Anxiety is what arises from our freedom. It comes from knowing that at any time we could choose to step over the edge. Sometimes knowing this feels too much to bear. Step far enough away from the edge, hug the cliff face, and the anxiety subsides. We've removed a possibility for ourselves that could lead us into danger and difficulty.Turning away from anxiety radically reduces the degree of freedom available to us. From our place of safety, face pressed against the smooth rock, there's no chance we'll find ourselves leaping from the edge. But there's also no possibility we'll see the huge vista laid out below, the distant horizon with its forests and rivers and towering mountains. No possibility we'll begin a journey towards them. The cliff-hugger has a vanishingly small world available to them.Whole organisations, careers and lives have been dedicated to holding on to the cliff face. Any hint of anxiety and we hold tighter, inventing the rules, structures, measures, justifications and stories that will lash us into place, and everyone else with us.But the very anxiety we're trying so hard to avoid is what is calling us into an enormous world of freedom. Taking up its call is our particular human heritage, and our unique human responsibility.

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1st Anniversary

On Living and Working is one year old today.363 posts so far, one for almost every day of the year.Writing daily since April 11th 2013 has been an illuminating, searching, and often joyful process - a practice in discovery, persistence, discipline, curiosity and self-kindness. And also, sometimes, a way in which I am finding a voice on behalf of much that seems very important to me.That other people read, pass what I've written on, and often respond has been an additional gift.So today, simply gratitude -

that the world, and current technology, makes this possible

to each of you who subscribe, follow my facebook and twitter feeds, or receive this from friends and colleagues

to those of you who have passed posts on to others you think will benefit

to the many people who have inspired me to write, and who have given me ideas either in person or through their own writing

and to all of you who have joined in by commenting or emailing me directly

Thank you.There is much more to come.

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Making strange

Do you ever have an experience where a familiar word, like queue or other or word itself, suddenly loses its familiarity and becomes strange to you?The experience can come by chance, though sometimes it's possible to make it happen by staring for long enough.

QUEUE

OTHER

WORD

What about with people? Moments when you turn towards those you know best, and who you love the most, and - for a moment - they are completely unfamiliar to you, suddenly - and inexplicably - strangers? How, we wonder, did you end up in my life?

So much of the world is this way to us - familiar in an easy, transparent manner, in which everything performs its function and nothing in particular stands out. And we go on in our ordinary way, responding to the world without having to pay much attention, without much by way of thought or connection.

But it's when we're prepared to make strange what is most obvious to us that the world, and people, in all their rarity, start to be apparent - present - to us.

And then all kinds of magic can happen.

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Not best practice

I wrote yesterday about the pitfalls of using process when what you're really hoping for is relationship. It's an example of a category error - trying to fix one kind of problem when what you're dealing with is a problem in a whole different domain.One reason why performance management processes can't work on their own to support engagement and people's own capacity to self-correct is that it's in the conversation between people that everything important happens. And skill in conversation is not at all the same as skill in following process.I find it interesting that in many organisations in which I've worked people say 'we have a successful performance management system' when they really mean 'we're successful in following the process'. Rarely does it mean that employees have a greater sense of enrolment, that there is deep systemic understanding of what's making performance possible and what's hindering it, or that anyone is able to self-observe and self-correct well enough to actually make a difference to anything. But at least everyone's filling in their forms, scheduling performance meetings, and assigning ratings...All of this is an example of why the idea of best practice can't easily be applied to human organisation.In a mechanical environment best practice makes sense: if we find that a certain cooling unit produces good results in my factory it's very likely to do the same in your factory, assuming we have similar conditions and similar equipment. But in addressing a human system itself it's often impossible to make such an assumption. The 5-point rating performance system I described yesterday, that might have worked so well somewhere else once before, may have very different effects here. Because here it's us, not them. And here we have our own particular relationships, commitments, language, understanding, priorities, values, habits, discourse, concerns, interests, conversations, bodies, culture... which means that a process on its own could well, might well, produce a whole different constellation of meaning and effect when applied here - including having the very opposite effect from what's intended.How many performance management processes which are apparently 'best practice' produce nothing but busyness, hiding, disillusionment, manipulation, game-playing and secrecy simply because we took the idea of best practice far more seriously than we ought to have done? And because as a result, we failed to take seriously what was really needed to address our concerns?

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Let's have a process for that...

What you really wantedHonest, enrolling conversations with colleagues and staff about progress, about what's important, about how they're doing, about what could change, and about what might be needed next.What you didForesaw all of the problems in doing this; felt your anxiety and the anxiety others would experience about being open in this way; and so invented a process instead:

"We'll set specific, measurable goals at the start of the year" - which avoids the difficulty of talking about all that people do that's uncertain, shifting, cannot be predicted, that which changes, that which is affected by the efforts of many and by the changing circumstances of the world.

"We'll have meetings with each member of our team twice a year to review progress" - which frees you, for most of the year, from the difficulty of turning towards one another and talking about things as they happen.

"We'll assign each person a performance rating from 1 to 5 so they know where they stand" - adding a measure makes it look like you've reached the truth of the situation. It gets you out of the difficulty of talking with nuance, of discovering together what's really happening, of learning from your employees, of discovering how much you don't know, and of finding out your own part in how things are going.

"We're finding that people have difficulty giving low ratings to their teams when required, so we'll have a forced distribution - a fixed quantity of 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s" - which saves you from any genuine conversation at all. By forcing the ratings you can simply say "I'm sorry, we really wanted to give you a 2 but there weren't any left, so we're giving you a 3".

"We'll pay people, or promote them, based on their rating" - which saves you from the trouble of genuine conversation about people's future and the future of your organisation - you can blame the rating on people's ability to move on.

Process can support you, yes. It may often be necessary.But every step here, if implemented without also cultivating the ability to speak and listen, takes you further from your original intention of enrolling, engaging, and supporting people's contribution. Every step makes all of you more machine like. Every step treats people more like a commodity and less like participants in a shared endeavour. And all because every step is being used to cover up anxiety - turning people away from the risky endeavour of skilful, genuine, nuanced, open conversation with each other.In the end, when what's required is talking with one another there's no substitute, no substitute at all, for the difficult work of learning to talk well with one another.And if you're looking for process to do the heavy lifting, you're looking in the wrong place.

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