Learning from Everything

It was the author Ursula Le Guin's birthday this week.In her novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard Ged, eager to become powerful and knowledgable, begins his apprenticeship with his first true teacher, the elderly Ogion.For the first few months, they mostly accompany one another in silence. Ged sweeps the floor, tends to the goats, prepares food. They take long walks through the tall trees and groves of the nearby forest. It's an immersion into the everyday. No talk of magic, no talk of spells, no talk of knowledge.One afternoon, with growing frustration, Ged turns to his master. "When are you going to start teaching me?". And Ogion, with great patience, turns to his student. "The lesson began long ago and all around you", he tells him, "but you did not discover yet where to look for it."So many of us wear our cynicism and our world-weariness as a badge of sophistication, as if it's a mark of our intelligence that nothing can touch us, no idea or possibility or hope move us, no idea illuminate our lives. We've seen it all, we tell ourselves. We know what's what. And in doing so we separate ourselves from our lives.But, like Ged, it might be possible even then to find out that everything and everyone can be our teacher, if we'll only drop our defences and rigidity long enough to let the world in. We might discover, as Ged does, that genuine wisdom is cultivated by never setting oneself apart from life and from other living things.And, as the years unfold, perhaps we get to learn as Ged does, "what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees."

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Goodbye

You say goodbye to her, perhaps at the doorway, perhaps with a hug, and you both say to one another 'see you soon'.But, as with every parting, you cannot know if that's true.So many possibilities. So many reasons why 'see you again' might not come to pass.Does remembering that, occasionally, help to bring you back in touch with the living, breathing wonder that she is, and that you are too?

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All life

It's easy to relate to life as if you're separate from it. As if life is something that happens to you or as if it's possible to reach out and manage life from a distance.Isn't that mostly how we experience ourselves?But if you look for a while, you may discover that there's no separation at all. That you are life, and life is you.How could it be otherwise? The body we each take to be our own is made up of trillions of cells, each bequeathed to us by a history that stretches back through millennia to the first single-celled creatures. Its structure, from the microscopic to the organisation of bones, muscles, organs is shared with billions of others living alongside us, and tens of billions more share aspects of it - eyes, hearts, blood, nerves, brains, cellular processes, hormones, enzymes. And all of that arises from the elements available on the planet we all inhabit and from the energetic processes made possible by the light and warmth of the sun.Where we each take ourselves to end - at the surface of our skin, perhaps - is not where life ends, at all.Given all of this, how could you possibly be separate from life?You are life or, put another way, the way that life is expressing itself right now.Or, you're the way life lives itself.And, given this, perhaps you can give up fighting for a while, and instead wonder at a world in which we get to be all of this, without having to ask or do anything to earn it.

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Unreasonable

If you're tired of the ways fitting in has you bending yourself out of shape - particularly if you're in one of those many environments in the world that talk about change while maintaining a dogged insistence on speaking, working, observing and practicing in long-standing, familiar ways - some words of support adapted from George Bernard Shaw:

Reasonable people change themselves to fit the world. Unreasonable people change the world to fit themselves.Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable people.

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Speech Acts 5: Conversations for Action

The fifth post in a series exploring Speech Acts – the foundations of speaking and listening to make meaningful action possible.If you've completed a satisfactory conversation for relationship (where you discovered shared concerns and commitments) and a conversation for possibility (where you identified possible paths to follow), you're ready to begin a conversation for action, which is where action between you and others gets coordinated through making requests and promises.Skilful requests and the promises that follow from them change the world for both speaker and listener, establishing new courses of action and freeing us to let others do what they've agreed to do.But it's easy to rush into this conversation too soon, before relationship is established, in which case you'll probably find that the conversation has little traction. For requests and promises to mean something everyone has to have enough of a shared world for them to make sense, and if my cares and your cares don't meet one another we hardly have anything to go on.Perhaps you've already been part of a situation where this is the case. We murmur our agreement to another action plan or to-do list, but inside we know we don't really care that much. Our spoken promises turn out to be vapour, and trust, enthusiasm, creativity and commitment drain away. Teams and projects can go on for a very long time in this enormously wasteful manner, because nobody has the language or the courage to call a stop the charade.And if you rush in before completing a conversation for possibility, you may have established a shared sense of commitment, but to what exactly? It doesn't take long to imagine all the breakdowns and difficulties that arise when in a single team of people have very different ideas of what's being worked on because nobody has spoken about it or agreed clearly what to do. This malaise, and all the confusion and duplication of effort that result, can easily affect whole organisations.The huge pitfall that people frequently fall into is trying to resolve the difficulties they're having getting action underway by having more conversations for action: asking again, insisting more urgently, or running another away day or meeting that produces one more list that everyone apparently agrees to but results in nothing.No, if you're in trouble in your conversations for action your difficulty might well lie in a prior conversation that hasn't been completed yet. So, slow down, and take the time to go back as far as you need - right back into a conversation for relationship if need be - so that you can lay some solid ground for your intentions to stand upon.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here. 

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Speech Acts 4: Conversations for Possibility

The fourth post in a series exploring Speech Acts – the foundations of speaking and listening to make meaningful action possible.

If you've taken the time to have a meaningful conversation for relationship with the people around you, you'll have discovered whether you have any shared interests, commitments, or concerns - the basis for getting into action together.Now it's time for a conversation for possibility, where you'll speak and listen to discover what you might actually get up to with each other.A conversation for possibility is not a conversation for action. You're not committing yet to do anything in particular, apart from finding out what could happen, what could open up, what new connections could be made, which paths could be followed.Allow everyone the space to bring their ideas, keeping the mood open as possible. Saying "yes, but..." in this conversation will close things down before they've had the space to take wing. There's no need to defend ideas, pull them apart, point out flaws, or decide how a plan will unfold. You'll get to all of that later. Speak and listen with the intention of opening space so that something meaningful, creative, and significant can emerge.Sometimes we try to have conversations for possibility without first establishing relationship. We think we can fake a genuine connection and sense of shared concern. This is very hard to pull off. There's no energy for creating possibilities if we don't care about much in common. But we try to do it anyway. Perhaps you've been in some of the endless meetings for possibility in the organisational world that take place without genuine relationship, and know how flat, dispiriting and confusing that can feel.And some of us find conversations for possibility very difficult, because we're so used to poking holes in other people's ideas. You'll need to spot this in yourself and set it aside if you want anything to flourish in this conversation.One of the most common ways you can make conversations for possibility difficult is by failing to name them for what they are. If any of the people you're with think they're in a conversation for action, they'll probably be thinking of all the practical implications of the ideas, and of all the difficulties they'll have to resolve. Don't be surprised if they become the objectors, the ones who try to close new ideas down before they've started.By being clear about which conversation you're intending to have, you'll give yourselves all much more room to explore, to breathe, and to create something new. And you'll create a space in which hopes, aspirations, and creativity can take wing.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here. 

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Speech Acts 3: Conversations for Relationship

The third post in a series exploring Speech Acts - the foundations of speaking and listening to make meaningful action possible.If you want to get up to something meaningful and productive with other people, the first conversation you're going to need is a conversation for relationship.In this conversation we're discovering the basis for our collaboration.What we're trying to establish, at minimum, is some sense of shared interest from which action can arise. A deeper, more powerful basis for relationship is shared concern about some issue or topic. And discovering shared commitment is more powerful still.Finding that we are all interested in technology might give a loose basis for some future collaboration. Finding that we are concerned in particularly about energy efficiency would provide a more focused set of possibilities. But it's only when we discover a shared commitment, such as a desire to produce a high-performance electric car to go to market next January, that we immediately open clear possibilities for focused coordinated action.And all of that can only be accomplished by taking the time to talk.Conversations for relationship require us to slow down, to do our best to understand one another, to suspend judgement, to get curious, and to listen - deeply. We allow our own world to be touched, opened, by the world of other people. Done well, we give our aspirations wings - the trust of others, the shared sense of being up to something that matters.Perhaps you can immediately see the difficulties that arise if we dive into action without having this conversation. Yet it happens all the time. We declare ourselves 'a team' and think that will do the trick, when we haven't even figured out whether we care about anything in common. And then we wonder why our experience of working together feels so listless and confusing. Or, because we can't tolerate or talk about our feelings of anxiety and urgency we start to do things before we even know why we're doing them, with all too predictable consequences.In the world of organisations at the moment the pressure to move quickly away from conversations for relationship seems to be growing, as far as I can tell. It's like leaving out the foundations because you're in a hurry to get the house up.We all know how that turns out.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here. 

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Speech Acts 2: Three Conversations

The second post in a series exploring Speech Acts - the foundations of speaking and listening to make meaningful action possible.Three different kinds of conversation are required for acting together effectively. They're like concentric circles - each provides the ground for the next. But we often miss one or more of them out. As each relies for its effectiveness on the one before, this can lead to all kinds of trouble.The foundational conversation is a conversation for relationship, in which we're understanding one another and finding out together whether we have any basis for action. Miss this and it's extraordinarily hard for us to agree why we're working together. It's difficult to dive in wholeheartedly. And equally difficult to understand what is being asked of us by others.On the shoulders of the conversation for relationship stands a conversation for possibility. Given the shared concerns, commitments and understanding from the conversation for relationship, what possibilities can we see? Are there any we care enough about on which to take action? And what are we ready to commit to, together? This is where hopes, aspirations, and creative responses take wing.Just watch how the energy for a project can dissipate if you don't explore possibilities fully. And if you haven't had a full and frank conversation for possibility, you run the risk of launching into action that nobody feels committed to taking. See The Abilene Paradox for a wonderful explanation of this, just one example of the endless wastefulness of meetings and projects we take up that nobody really wanted.And finally, a conversation for action in which requests, offers and promises are made. This conversation changes the world for each of us, because it's where we make commitments to act in support of our own and others' intentions. Done well, we coordinate our efforts so that our intentions are realised. Done poorly, we suffer duplication of effort, the frustration and confusion of promises that mean little, and the resignation and erosion of trust that comes from repeatedly being let down.Over the next few days I'll take up each of these conversations in turn.Meanwhile, you could start to look at your own pattern of conversations with others.

Is there one of these conversations that you favour? One that you miss out repeatedly? What are the consequences?

Are there times when you're in one of the conversations and the people you're speaking with are in another? For example, what happens if you think you're in a conversation for action and others are still in a conversation for relationship?

And when there's a breakdown or difficulty, how do you try to resolve it? By pushing on further in the conversation you're already in (for example, dealing with confusion or listlessness by coming up with more to do - a conversation for action - rather than exploring how committed everyone is to the current course - a conversation for possibility)?

Your answers to these questions might open up new insights and actions for you immediately, and will help you in exploring the three conversations further with me over the coming days.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here. 

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Speech Acts

One of the great contributions of the philosophers John Austin, in the mid-20th century, and John Searle, who is still active today, has been an important claim about language. While a large part of philosophy of language looked at how language describes the world, they became interested in how language changes the world.All human action, they point out, is coordinated through language. Speaking is rarely just speaking about something. It's more often an act through which we make it possible to do things in conjunction with others, taking up and putting down commitments so we can pursue the possibilities that are important to us.This week's writing here will be dedicated to this topic. We'll start by exploring three different conversations that make action with others possible, and the many muddles and mistakes that can be avoided by knowing which is which, and which is called for in any moment.And then we'll explore conversations for action in more depth - in particular how requests and promises work and don't work, and what we can do to improve our use of them.There's so much to discover by looking closely at all this, because many of the difficulties we face, and much of our wastefulness, can be tackled by developing skill in speaking and listening.You could start to explore this topic by observing yourself closely over the next few days. Look for all the ways in which you run into difficulty in coordinating with other people. Look closely in particular at all the times what you asked of others didn't happen, or at least not in the way you intended.And look too at all those times when you brought your best effort and intentions to a project only to find that it wasn't needed, wasn't appreciated, or that what you'd been doing was not quite what other people had hoped.And let's see if, by studying this topic, we can improve things together.

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You can read more on 'Speech Acts' - conversations, requests and promises - here. 

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Naming

If you want to bring about change in any system - from your inner world to a whole organisation - one skill you can work on is naming.When we have a name for something - table, chair, thought, mood, conversation, relationship, inner critic - we give ourselves a way of pointing to it, observing it, and talking about it in the world we share with others. We bring it into the light so that it can be seen, greatly increasing our capacity to observe, make choices, and act.What's important to see here is that our patterns of conversation tend to repeatedly draw attention to some things while leaving others unobserved. We keep this going by insisting on speaking in the same way, with the same language, and with the same people over and over. In this way our speaking becomes habitual, and loses its much of its power to reveal things to us. And what's unobserved remains in the background, where whatever effect it is having remains silent and invisible.We mostly have hardly a clue how much of human life is in the background at any moment, how much it is shaping us, and how little attention we're paying to it.So skilful naming has power. It's no wonder that in ancient mythology names are understood to give great influence over people and situations and that the simple act of naming daemons, the silent shadowy forces of the underworld, immediately robs them of much of their potency.And this is why you can open many possibilities by paying attention to patterns in your private, inner conversation and in your conversation with others, and by introducing names for what is currently unnamed. The more precise the naming, and the more you use it to bring forward those aspects of the background that are shaping things, the more powerful the possibilities.And if you're interested, you can do much to learn new words - distinctions - that you don't yet have in order to do this. Study books, talks, people, poems, songs, movies. Attend courses.And instead of staying in your own familiar world with its patterns and habits of language, spend time with people who live and work in very different situations to you. The distinctions that are central in their world, and that are right on the margins of your own, can be among the most powerful ones to discover.

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