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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What we're scared of

I was talking with a group of people in very senior positions in a multinational organisation about fear: their fear of having genuine conversations with one another, their fear of telling the truth.This, an organisation in which decisions made affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

"They won't like what I have to say.""They won't like me.""I won't be in control of what happens.""It will damage our relationship.""I won't know what to say.""It will open a can of worms."

Each of their fears, when held up to scrutiny, turned out to be quite slight compared to the importance of the conversation - a conversation, not had, that affected them, their colleagues, and the many people who depended upon them.How could it be, then, that they were so paralysed?When we try to account for ourselves and what holds us back, we're often looking in the wrong place.Because we're often not so scared of what will happen in the world through speaking up. We're terrified of our feelings about it. We're scared of our shame. We're scared of our guilt. We're scared of the gripping, swirling bodily feeling of being uncertain. We're fearful of feeling fear. We imagine we won't be able to tolerate it. And, of course, we're scared that we'll feel all of this if we start to talk about feelings or what goes on in our bodies.And so it becomes self-sealing. We'll do whatever it takes, including making up unsound explanations, to avoid encountering what we're scared to feel.And the more we avoid the conversation about all of this - about what we're really scared of - the more we trap ourselves in an endless cycle of inaction, denial and turning away.

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The four of you

When you're talking with another person, remember that there are always more than two of you present.At the very least there's you, and them, and your inner-critic and their inner-critic.Whatever the two of you are visibly up to, there's an often hidden dynamic between the two inner-critics (who work hard to keep themselves invisible) as they jostle to keep you in line, watch out for attacks or supposed attacks from the other, spur you into defending yourself (often times when no defence is called for), have you be insistent or rigid or judging or withdrawn.And each critic spurs the other on, inventing slights and hurts, and anticipating what's it imagines is yet to come.All of this is one reason why you can sometimes look back on a conversation with bemusement and confusion. 'What on earth happened there?' you ask yourself. 'I thought we were only talking about this morning's meeting, but now I feel hurt and uncertain, and so does she'.One way to help yourself and others is to spot all of this and give name to it, at first to yourself. Learn the ways it shows up and what it gets up to when your attention is elsewhere.And then, over time, bring the existence of the critic and all its manifestations into conversation. This takes courage and openness. But bringing the inner critic out of its hiding place allows it to be seen and talked about, and responded to, and lessens its power to manipulate behind the scenes.Your inner world is always making itself known in the outer world, whether you like it or not, and it's true for everyone else too. The more you can give name to, and the more you can bring it forward from its otherwise invisible background, the more chance you'll have of working with it in service of you and everyone around you.

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What we'll do not to feel it

A story about the trouble caused when we can't talk about shame and anxiety in organisational life:A global retailer struggling to meet the expectations of the markets, brings in a new measurement system for its stores, with more than sixty targets to meet.A daily ratings table of stores is published internally, naming those meeting the targets and those falling short. It's described as a logical move to increase performance in difficult times. And at the same time, it allows the board to deny the anxiety they're feeling: "we've done everything we can do, and we've responded in a clear and rational manner to market conditions".Meanwhile, the ratings system has very effectively pushed the anxiety onto the store managers, where even respected, skilful, long-serving managers are reduced to a daily jostle for the top few spots. Unable or unwilling to challenge the system itself (after all, it's apparently a rational response to the current difficulty), they start to put pressure on their department heads for the daily delivery of the targets. And, unable to start a conversation about how all of this feels to everybody, the department heads - fearful of being shamed - look for whatever they can do to hit their targets.This is where the real trouble begins.Because in the face of unnamable anxiety and the unbearable threat of shame, even respected, diligent department heads start to look for ways to game the system.Numbers are fiddled. Statistics reinterpreted. Orders are left piling up in the warehouse because nobody can keep up with the new standards for shelf layout. Items in the store are relabelled so that products look like they're available when the mystery shopper team comes around. Staff members are taken off other important duties to work on the tills when queue-length is measured, but the queues are allowed to reach enormous and frustrating lengths at other times.The target numbers are, frequently, met - aside from for those few unfortunate store managers who aren't wily enough to play the system - but standards drop relentlessly across the group and customers start to take their business elsewhere.Public shame, skilfully dealt with. Skilful gaming of the system, denied. The organisation becomes a system for avoiding anxiety rather than serving customers. Nobody talking about it - "it'll open a can of worms".You can see this same drama played out in hospitals, whole health systems, schools, retailers, service industries, transport, government, with huge and debilitating effect.And in most places nobody's talking about what's really going on, because we've made mood undiscussable.If we're going to deal with all of this - and we must - we're going to have to wake up to the fact that organisations are always made up of people, and people are always caught up in moods that shape what can be seen and what's possible. Our insistence on understanding people as detached, strictly rational parts of a well-oiled machine is not doing anything to address these difficulties.And without the courage to do this, we're going to condemn ourselves to a future of looking good while we undo our best and most important efforts.

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