Planet Earth

Along with the devastation and suffering in Haiti, this past week saw the passing of Canadian poet C. K.  Page. Page received a variety of tributes and accolades over her long career, including having her poem Planet Earth selected by the United Nations for its 2000 Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry reading series. The poem takes its inspiration from the Pablo Neruda poem In Praise of Ironing.

For me, the imagery and music in Page’s poem is an appropriate homage for Haiti and its citizens and for C. K. Page whose love of the earth began decades ago. The video below is of Page reading Planet Earth for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. The entire poem is included below the video.

Shadow and Light

I want to talk about confronting the shadow side with courage.

In a leadership program that I co-facilitate we ask people to reflect on what they are a “force for” in their leadership work. This means reaching deeply inside to find and name the part of us that fiercely stands up for what we believe in. It means giving voice to it, rising to meet it, embracing the power of it, and using it courageously.
When people begin to discover what they are a “force for,” they often feel vulnerable, because it is usually experiences of pain and brokenness which have given rise to their inner passion and force. There is also an enormous sense of wonder that enters the room when someone has the courage to revisit the difficult, often scarring experiences, and in the sharing there is a release of hidden, walled-in power which crackles and flares into a warmth-giving fire.

One early December afternoon, when the fields were lightly covered with snow, a group of 25 of us listened intently as a senior police officer in his early 40’s shared his story about being a force for certainty.

Its a Wonder-full Life….in Bhutan

Almost exactly a year ago, I had the good fortune of being on the faculty of an innovative social change  program, commissioned by an International NGO  (SNV) based in The Hague.  During one of my long and somewhat lonely business trips through Asia I was invited to a small birthday party in downtown Thimpu, (population 98,676), the “New York” of Bhutan . It was probably the most unusual pre-Christmas party I have ever attended.

The guests were a wonderfully diverse group, including a German-English hotel manager (the host); a Dutch/French couple who run an animal hospital for the many sick and injured dogs living on the margins of Bhutanese society; a couple of middle-aged New Zealanders doing volunteer work with schools, a German IT engineer doing volunteer work while his Austrian wife manages UNDP projects, and others from Poland, Sweden, and Czech Republic all living in this tiny obscure country, the size of Switzerland. We ate cake, swapped stories, sang old songs and talked about various Christmas holiday plans and traditions, all of them basically irrelevant in this Bhuddist country.  The host explained that one of his fondest traditions was to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and that he would love to watch it with us.  No one but he and I had ever seen or heard of it.  So we re-arranged the furniture, bundled ourselves in blankets (no central heating in Bhutan), and he beamed it up onto a bare wall.

Bridging Divides

Collaboration among a diverse range of stakeholders is now widely regarded as essential for addressing the most pressing, complex social and business issues. The reasons for this rise of interest in collaboration across sectors are fairly clear: no one actor, sector or group possess sufficient knowledge, resources, skills or energy to successfully counter the complex dynamics that hold poverty in place, for example, or that put oil-sands development ahead of acting boldly to forestall climate and other environmental disasters. In cities across Canada, government, business, faith-based organizations, school boards, multicultural organizations and others are joining forces to, among other initiatives, strengthen poor neighborhoods, build safe communities and eliminate homelessness. For example, recently we worked with the city of Kitchener, Ontario which brought together 90 community stakeholders to create a Culture of Safety.

Deciphering that Burning Fire

January 15, 2008 was the launch of the Canadian Organization Development Institute’s (CODI) first training in organization development and change. This CODI initiative is a twenty-day certificate program, and as far as we know, this is the first privately run organization development and change training program in Canada. Ten experienced and eager people signed up for the inaugural session.

One of the questions we talked about during the evening session was this: What brought you to the work of organization development and change? This question sent me on quite a journey, and I found traces in a number of corners and caverns of my mind. And what I found is not so much how I came to organization development and change; rather how I became present to something that was calling me. Here’s the story I’ve got in my head right now.

I recall a moment from years ago when a wide-smile feeling of awe spread throughout my body as I watched the Pacific Ocean on a grey day. I saw cords of light stride down from the clouds and dance in-synch with the ocean’s currents. It was as if some invisible structure of the universe was being offered to me. The dance went on until rain drove me into my car. I had no words to describe what I saw. Not even my science teacher-neighbor, the one who won my allegiance when he dropped dry ice into a bowl of water, could explain.

Shadows and Light: The “Art” of Working at the Edges

As I face the Threshold of 2008 I am in a reflective mood. Here is a short essay I originally wrote to include in a scrapbook of reflections we are exchanging with our colleagues in the Canadian Organization Development Institute. I hope it will inspire you to reflect on your “art” too.

For me, “art” is about shadow and light. Whether it is painting, sculpting, writing, or performing music, its all about how we see, say, hear, taste and touch shadow and light. When I think about my “art-work” in complex change, I see that a lot of my focus is on discovering what is hiding between the shadows, carefully lifting the leaves and allowing a little brightness in. I try to show others where to find the beauty and strength that is dormant, buried, or shaded-out; where unvarnished truth is under-exposed, and taken for granted.

This art-work is also about seeing myself in new ways. Each time I show up in a system, I need to look hard within as well as without.

Renowned photographer Freeman Patterson says it this way:

“A camera always looks both ways. Like all serious photographers, I have to accept and deal with this fact – the reality that my images are as much a documentation and interpretation of myself as of the subject matter I choose.

Although on first viewing, an individual image, in and of itself, rarely acts as a signpost or marker of the stages of my personal development or growth, a collection of pictures provides an overview that tells the human story, and enables both myself and viewers to identify images that are representative of important changes or stages. When I am discarding old slides or negatives, I have to be careful not to throw out my life history.”

results and intimacy

If your life is anything like mine, I often feel like I’m engaged in endless activities: clients to call; books to read; meetings to plan and facilitate; lawn to mow, house to maintain, writing to do; family time, yoga classes, haircut, doctor visits, and so on. It is challenging to find the thread connecting it all, not to mention how tiring all the busyness can feel.

Yes I have goals and responsibilities; results to achieve, relationships to nurture and interests to pursue; in short, I have many good reasons for doing what I do. Yet good reasons often beget more good reasons to do more things, to take on more projects. This sense of strain and stress is something I hear about from a great many of the people with whom I work. And this state of affairs leaves me with a nagging question: What if all our effort comes to nothing and our lives, our organizations, or the world, doesn’t get better despite all the advances, successes, and best intentions? Yet, it isn’t as bleak as this sounds.

from the plains can you imagine mountains?

One evening, a few months ago, I was sitting on the sheltered roof of a campement in the Dogon Country, Mali, on the edge of the great Sahara desert. As the thick (and still burning hot) night descended, my African companions began to quiz me about Canada and Canadian ways of life. Finally one asked: “I have often wondered, what is it like to drive through snow? Isn’t it sort of like driving through the drifting sands we have here?”

The Mountain and The Plain

Here in Southern Ontario the landscape is fairly flat. Rolling hills are as high as it gets, except for the occasional outcrop along the Niagara Escarpment. This is far different from the landscape of Southern California where rugged mountains were very much part of my life and perspective when I was growing up.

Recently I was thinking about the differences in these landscapes and the way they speak to how organizations perform and are led. Until relatively recently, organizations were run from the mountain top, so to speak, where individual wizards or a small bands of arbiters carefully crafted strategy and gave direction they expected others to follow. Whether or not renowned leaders from the past worked in such a manner, the predominant mindset of organizational performance was the mountain. A plain, in contrast, brings to mind a ‘level playing field,’ one where unobstructed sight lines invite open collaboration and communication between diverse perspectives.

The Founder’s Trap – Getting In and Getting Out

Some recent experiences with two highly effective executive directors and the challenges they are facing with their organizations has led me back to Dr. Ichak Adizes’ book of, Corporate Lifecycles. In this book, Dr. Adizes writes of the predictable patterns of development organizations go through. In particular, I was drawn back to Dr. Adizes comments about what he terms the Founder’s Trap.