opinion
The thought of one person feeling unhappy, cramped, or unsafe at work prompts my reflection on the individual, their pain, and their efforts to alleviate it, or even to survive it. And how ever they’re experiencing it, that pain goes far beyond the individual themselves. It’s a systemic question which reverberates broadly.
An individual who’s unhappy at work may experience exhaustion as they may have respond in a variety of ways: at an existential level, they may fear for their jobs and may even transgress their own values in order to protect their roles. They may feel humiliated and may create strategies to preserve their dignity. Those strategies may preserve or, alternatively damage, key relationships. Individuals may openly or implicitly challenge what they perceive as the cause of their pain. They may attempt to engage in open, honest conversations with those they perceive as being the source of their unhappiness in a quest to discuss and resolve or ameliorate the issue – which may have the desired effect or, in turn, may entail further risk. They may attempt conversation or dialogue with others who have some kind of power in the situation – and, again, the outcome might mean positive change or it might risk a worsening of the situation.
Most immediately close to them, there may be something at play about the style with which they’re led and managed: is it characterised by a ‘JFDI’ approach – a myopic, transactional approach which may or may not use or abuse the power of the leader or manager – or by an approach which cares about, and seeks to understand, how they really are at a level beyond what shows on the surface? How do the manager and leader exercise their power, and how does power show up between them? Does such a transactional approach prioritise the leader or manager’s personal ambitions and goals above broader interests, or does the agenda go and enquire beyond that? A leader’s or manager’s approach often speaks volumes about the culture of the team.
Of course, I’m thinking of the psychological safety that may be present or absent in the system (like being pregnant, you can’t feel ‘a bit’ safe: you either do feel safe or you don’t). When psychological safety is present, unhappiness at work not only is safe to present on the surface but can be discussed constructively. And when it’s absent it goes underground, where it might proliferate, multiply like a virus, and/or result in a leakage of talent as fear grows and people decide to jump ship.
On the other hand, when you take a systemic perspective you may see – as Nora Bateson’s thinking on warm data, and as systemic constellations, show us – more about the interrelationships that exist between the elements in the system: the history not only of the team or organisation and the individuals which compose them, but also of the culture, attitudes, beliefs and enshrined behaviours on which the team rests and functions day to day. Enquiring into what’s going on beyond what shows on the surface – as happens with a systemic constellation in practice – can be deeply illuminating. That illumination can be leveraged so as not only to explain what’s currently happening, but also to enable the development of strategies towards more healthy, balanced and safe functioning.
A team, organisation or culture which functions in a healthy, balanced and safe way will be able to do so even in an environment which is VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), and/or the next iteration of VUCA – RUPT (Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical and Tangled) and arguably the next iteration of RUPT: BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible) which futurist Jamais Cascio has originated in order to provide recognition – and an underpinning strategy – for responding to the current ‘age of chaos, an era that intensely, almost violently, rejects structure. It isn’t simple instability, it’s a reality that seems to actively resist efforts to understand what the hell is going on. This current moment of political mayhem, climate disasters, and global pandemic?—?and so much more?—?vividly demonstrates the need for a way of making sense of the world, the need for a new method or tool to see the shapes this age of chaos’ [1]
Amy Elizabeth Fox illustrates the benefits that can flow from looking at leadership and organisational life through a BANI lens – and indeed bringing something as apparently fundamental as caring about your people in a thoughtful way that enshrines humanity, compassion and love. Cultures which succeed, she remarks, are those which, in this BANI climate, function in this thoughtful way. They consciously experiment (which means that failure is not worthy of blame), collaborate, are patient with uncertainty, slow down, and encourage rest and renewal.
In such cultures unhappiness and a sense of lack of safety can be replaced by safe transparency, innovation, collaboration, high rates of retention and the freedom to initiate and change.
[1] https://www.impactinternational.com/insights/bani-what-it-and-how-can-it-help-us
Wounding, healing and wholeness
‘Wounding, healing and wholeness’ feels especially relevant to a world that I experience as increasingly fractured and polarised, and presented so often as black and white, characterised by schisms. The meaning I create out of wounding is inevitably negative and narrow. It evokes pain. However, as I sat with the enquiry, I realised that my reflection was broadening out into wondering whether there’s any sense in which wounding might be positive. What if I adopted a stance of both greater compassion and greater self-compassion? If we think of wounding in terms of damage or pain, it’s interesting to consider the antidote as healing – and interesting to look at healing from a few different perspectives. Wounding can cause alienation, separation and isolation – a route to possibly more wounding. Does healing necessarily mean wholeness – and what does wholeness mean, anyway?
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Going slow
I’m conscious of the benefits of going slowly enough in a coaching relationship to allow the coaching client the time and space to be able to surface what’s actually going on for them – to begin to perceive at a deeper level, and also to develop the trust in themselves (and in me) to be able to express it. The work culture that many of us are familiar with celebrates speed, being busy (albeit not necessarily productive) and doing. This culture encourages us to race on and get as much done as we can. This race doesn’t allow space for the underpinning, important information to emerge. Maybe we need to be engaging in not-thinking, not-doing – but in being – in becoming aware of a wider and deeper landscape than the immediate task. A landscape that will reveal and illuminate more. My being in the slow lane, and my encouragement of clients to be there too, leads to benefits for both them and me. It means being conscious, in all senses of the word – not being carried along on any sort of tide without being aware of it, and choosing in awareness. And it means continuing to grow.
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Love in leadership
I’ve recently co-facilitated with Jeremy Keeley a workshop for Sadler Heath on love in leadership. When organisations focus on interconnection and interdependence, -characteristics of an organisational culture in which love is more likely to show up at work - those organisations tend to get creativity, innovation, connection, psychological safety, inclusion – everything that organisations say they want. What draws me is a visceral sense of the essential humanity, care and inevitable connection, and – incidentally - the consequent sustainable business benefits – of such an approach. Experiential characterises how a leader typically manifests love in the workplace. It’s not a skill, it’s not a process, it’s not an approach: it’s how the leader lives their working life, how they relate to others, the lens through which they perceive, interpret and respond to the world around them. Leading with love means the leader loving their people, their mission, their purpose and their organisation, the world beyond their organisation and the entire biosphere. It’s a way of being.
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Immunity to Change
My client came to coaching in some distress. She worked very hard, and loved her work, but wanted to have more discipline in the organisation of her non-clinical time and to work on her habitual pattern of never saying no. She was overloaded and exhausted, and her exhaustion was having an impact on her effectiveness and behaviour, which was at times intolerant and verbally aggressive. Yet the habitual patterns persisted: nothing changed, despite her being desperate to change. Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan originated the theory of Immunity to Change, which can offer both clues to understanding what stands in the way of an individual actually making the change that they seem to rationally and enthusiastically want, and to a process for releasing the obstacles to change. I was privileged to participate in a day with colleagues at consultancy MDV on Immunity to Change, insightfully and sensitively facilitated by Nathan Roberts. My experience in that workshop reinforced how significant our somatic experience – our sensations, and our impulses to move – and facilitated movement are for gaining insight and a different kind of understanding from merely cognitive understanding, rationality and reasoning.
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Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a major feature of complexity – and neither expertise, efficiency nor control alone will allow us to adequately engage with it. If an attempt at orderly, predictable efficiency is all that we bring to a situation that is in fact complex, we will find our adaptability, our flexibility, our resilience, and our capacity to manage the situation compromised. Dealing with uncertainty requires both a readiness to experiment at small scale, learn from the experiment and experiment again, and seek human connection, relationship and the ability to work effectively with interdependency and interconnection. Key here is cross-functional collaboration and coalition-building. Margaret Heffernan calls attention to the invaluable role of trust and empathy (and I would add psychological safety) as human relationships develop, and to the value of the artist’s creativity. We may have something valuable to learn from people who are neuro-diverse. Useful guidelines for negotiating uncertainty might be to start by focusing on relationships and on small-scale experiments, and to give up on the search for control and predictability.
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Interconnection and interdependence
The exhibition ‘Soil: The World at Our Feet’ displayed the hidden depths of soil. Soil is the great interconnector’. The fungus network explores the labyrinth of the soil, transporting nutrients to plant roots…. and trading them with the plant in exchange for carbon, which includes sugars…. the plant support system. Coming together, the networks achieve things that none could achieve alone’. Isn’t this a reflection of how human society and organisations function? Not only humans, but all living beings, are interconnected through this kind of vast and deeply complex mycelium network. In parallel, human relationships and the complexity of the systems they form, are essential for the functioning of society. In the plant world, ‘being is always being with….’ Being with. Through profound presence and deep listening, that’s what my coaching offers, and that’s what enables growth, development and change in my clients.
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Edges with depth
On a group residential weekend of experiential learning the contextual theme was ‘edge’ – learning on the edge, right on the edge between sea and land. A cacao ceremony offered me a step towards a profound connection with both the simplicity and the magic of what nature can offer us. And equally, and simultaneously, I was challenged by the deeply unfamiliar nature of the ceremony, which called on a capacity to suspend judgment made by reference only to my habitual criteria for assessing the world around me. A walk onto the nearby beach and rockpools to forage for edible seaweed was a journey into the unknown, of a completely different kind. We take from the sea, so what are we going to give back to the sea? As I’ve continued to broaden my reflections on where else reciprocity might be appropriate in our troubled world, it seems to me that we could do a lot more to offer care and caring back to it.
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Passionate detachment
She was an entrepreneur, passionate about, but exhausted by, the demands of building her business. She felt like the business was running her rather than vice versa. She knew that something had to change if she – let alone the business – was going to sustain. Being able to be passionately detached is about 'creating an equilibrium where we are passionately engaged in what we love, but are reasonably detached from the day-to-day outcomes of our actions ....we passionately take charge of living our dharma, our life’s purpose, while letting go of being invested in the external measures of our progress' i.e. the outcomes we achieve. While you’re subject to the magnetic attraction of your passion it’s hard to see anything other than the detail of the object of your passion. Courageously, this entrepreneur began to experiment on a very small scale with self-compassion, with doing things she enjoyed. She saw the business flourishing in a way that it hadn’t done before. Meanwhile, she had a new sense of balance. Almost without noticing, she had detached herself from being possessed by the business she loved. As the business was beginning to flourish, so was she: she and the business were both getting a life.
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Spaciousness
A fascinating new research report on spaciousness has just been published: ‘Permission to Pause: Rediscovering ‘spaciousness’ at work’, by Professor Megan Reitz and John Higgins. The researchers highlight two different modes of behaving: ‘doing’ (paying attention to action, achievement, productivity and the like – the territory of busyness) and ‘spacious’ (attention is focused on enquiry and exploration, interdependence and relationship). Their research separates busyness from flourishing. Busyness seems to be part of the entrenched culture in many systems and organisations, militating against the kind of thoughtfulness that helps ensure that action is the right action. There’s much here that brings to mind for me both mindfulness (paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and without judgment) and psychological safety. Spaciousness it isn’t only a way of being for teams and groups. It’s also a way of being that we as individuals can offer to ourselves.
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