C r e a t i n g t h e c o n t a i n e r s f o r g r o u p i n s i g h t
Michael Chender
Photo: Douglas Dickel
In 2010, Dharma/Arte will promote its first activities on the creative processes and their connection to new forms of leadership. For this Dharma/Arte will bring to Brazil Michael Chander and Arawana Hayashi, from the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute (ALIA Institute).
The view of the ALIA Institute is, according to Michael Chender, “that working with complex challenges (not susceptible to engineered or traditionally managed solutions), which characterizes what we all now face on many levels, demands new ways of engaging, as represented by the U-process, dialogue, systems thinking. However, to be most effective in working with these, one needs to fully appreciate and access the ‘view’ that lies behind them, something rarely made explicit within these practices. That view, of interdependence, constant change, no fixed points of judgement, and so on is powerful and inspiring, but hard to truly take on because we are so habituated to operating in different ways. So to do so, we need a personal ‘practice’ of this view. We could also call this a practice of becoming authentic”.
The text below is a chapter from an upcoming book by Michael Chender.
Creating the containers for group insight
We refer to the conditions that allow people to cohere as a group, to develop trust and use the group energy to go beyond their own limitations as the “container.” We could equally call it a “culture,” but container has the sense of holding something inside that may be more fluid. That suits our purposes well. With a good container, the right ingredients, and some heat, you cook something delicious.
So the container consists of the rules, understandings, processes, attitudes, forms and environment that create the conditions for the richness and evolution of the collaborative—whether a group, team, organization, community or society. What holds this container together is that all parts of it reflect a common view.
To begin, let’s look at how we create a container for ourselves; for only if we can understand it in ourselves can we can apply the principles skilfully and flexibly for others. If not, the fact that we are not walking the talk will undermine our best intentions. On a personal basis, the shape of our container is our view—how we frame experience. We can deal with whatever arises with some equanimity if our container is strong enough. For instance, the outlook of basic goodness allows us to deal with all kinds of challenges. People who have come through unimaginable hardships in their lives and not only survived but thrived often talk about faith or having a strong personal vision or a code.
The view or attitude of authenticity we are seeking to evoke and embody—recognizing the inherent wisdom and capability in ourselves and others—is something natural, fundamental, and it goes against many deeply ingrained habits. We need reminders and effort to undo those habits, and to support and deepen our understanding.
Let’s look at how this works this using the example of meditation, which provides an excellent example of a container. In meditation we are simply trying to see better what is, and let our own wisdom and innate strength overcome the bonds of reactivity, fear, and habit. However, when we begin to look at ourselves more directly, many of us experience resistance to coming face-to-face with our anxieties, regrets, fears, etc. We feel we might be overwhelmed; we’re scared of the unexplored corners of our minds. All the soothing advice in the world doesn’t change that. On the other hand, some of us get too entranced with our own inner dramas and wind up simply brooding and strengthening our habits. For some people, this involves cycling around in a sense of failure (or for the successful, in a sense of being a fraud). This is why “keeping busy” is generally supposed to be a good thing, regardless of how pointless what you are keeping busy at is.
We need to be able encounter our challenges without being sucked in or overcome by them. In the case of meditation, the container is more specifically the attitude that our repetitive thoughts are just mental habits that don’t define who we are and that can be stripped of their power over us and let go of, and that our truer nature contains equanimity, wisdom, compassion, capability, and joy.
Genuinely believing in our inherent power and goodness can be a stretch, so the container is further expressed in a very concrete and experiential way in the posture and technique. When you are sitting and a disturbing thought comes, you don’t get up, or wring your hands, or slap your forehead and slump over (at least not in public). The continuing upright posture may mask a wild mind, but the attitude of the body begins to influence the activity of the mind, and you slowly pass from pretending to be relaxed and undisturbed to actually relaxing. And when you find yourself mulling things over, or in a fantasy, you simply go back to awareness of the breath. Its always there, always providing the next train out to leave the fight happening on the station platform. The more we pay attention to these elements of the container—attitude, posture, and technique—the more seamless and stronger the container becomes, and, as a result, the more your mind can relax. It doesn’t have to fight to keep a lid on things you don’t want to acknowledge because the elements of the container allow them the room to come up “safely.” You can handle them. If your attitude isn’t strong enough to defuse them, the techniques of posture and breath will allow you to not be engulfed by them. As you develop more confidence, in turn you can handle more uncertainty, more openness, more diversity, more things you would have found threatening at one point but that now are becoming interesting.
Sitting straight, being quiet and doing nothing would be rightly seen as a big waste of time, if there was no coherent view (in this case, of basic goodness) behind it. Furthermore, it would be highly ineffective if the techniques and form didn’t express that view, and help realize it. This play between view and container also applies to groups. In this case, “view” is more than values and beliefs. For instance, I may hold honesty and integrity as values, and believe that I will be rewarded by life if I practice them, but my more basic and encompassing outlook on how things work, of which I am barely conscious if at all, is that I live in a fundamentally hostile universe in which I must be conventionally “good” at all times. In this case, there is a background anxiety which makes the expression and practice of my values rather limiting and self-serving. Despite all my good intentions and hard work, others will pick up, if only subliminally, on this as a limiting factor in my ability to create a container in which they can fully bring forth their gifts. In creating the container for others, the deeper our view goes, the stronger the container we can contribute to.
Photo: Douglas Dickel
Confidence × charisma
Groups can evolve through challenges and access a collective intelligence to the extent that there is a strong container. The more seamless the boundaries, the more room is held inside for what needs to come out, and the more individuals feel they can take off their masks and bring their full intelligence and feeling to interacting with others. With a strong container, challenges, mistakes and surprises are not viewed as threats, irritating as they may be, but as the stepping stones to greater intelligence and insight. Without that understanding, resistance, rather than being aired and its wisdom drawn out, will manifest as grudging compliance, paralysis or dissolution. Many well-intentioned collaborative initiatives suffer this fate.
So what are the key elements to creating the containers in which thinking and acting together can be powerfully supported in a group? One is clearly the role of the leader, any person who has or takes responsibility for guidance of the group, at its initial or later stages. This covers both line responsibility for teams or units in business, as well as the responsibility one takes on in calling a group of friends to start on a non-profit project, or stepping up as a spokesperson for a community. In this role, you assume at least an initial responsibility for skilfully building, holding and protecting the container.
In classic thinking about teams, the leader most directly influences the first stage of team development, Forming. The rest of the stages are team-member-driven, with the leader establishing organizational norms and values, and facilitating or guiding the teams as needed. In any kind of leadership. As in the initial stages the leader is the embodiment of the container, attitude and resulting tone is key. The leader’s own sense of being—their degree of confidence, openness and energy—will immediately communicate to others how much of themselves they dare bring to the project. The expression of one’s own integrity and of interest in others will naturally engender trust, even loyalty. Specific personality or leadership styles are a secondary concern, and even competence in the issues at hand is not the primary challenge; it can be distributed among the group, if the leader has confidence to do so.
Genuine confidence and the qualities of engagement that come out of it are quite different than charisma, the use of which can be helpful or dangerous in equal measure in the short term, and is often problematic in the longer term. A charismatic leader can impart a sense of confidence and hope in the troops that allow them to step beyond their normal limitations. The problem is that without the leavening qualities of authentic leadership, that inspiration remains based on unrealistic hero- or saviour-worship, instead of being a new opening to one’s own strengths―individually and in community. If people become psychologically dependent on the leader, when the leader turns out to have feet of clay, huge disappointment results. No real development has taken place, of individuals or of the group, because there never was an appropriate container. Of course an unscrupulous leader can use charisma to lead people right over the brink, as we see again and again throughout the world when fiery speakers feed people’s sense of grievance as a means to gain dictatorial power.
Building a strong container
Another factor that can help create a strong container and is critical to maintaining one over time is the connection between participants. This can be forged by time and experience together, as well as by the sense of shared purpose. If we are truly friends, then we already have a very strong container of care and support. If we have come through triumph and adversity together, we have learned a lot about each other, about how to tease out our friends’ brilliance and not take their neurosis personally. These bonds may be forged very quickly in extraordinary circumstances—for example in a small army unit, where each man or woman literally depends on the other for their lives. Learning to tolerate and even love one another, to have a sense of humor when the worst of the other begins to come out, generally takes time as well as shared circumstances. This is one reason why it is hard to launch and coordinate challenging projects when they rely on developing a sense of shared trust online, without a lot of face-to-face connection.
Time is necessary for defences to relax and trust to develop, and also for creative ideas to emerge. In our short-attention span culture, time seems the commodity at the greatest premium. We can create “pressure-cooker” environments to move group work along faster, but we need to realize that in that case we are not creating a machine but a hothouse for growing. Once we add more heat and nutrients things may grow faster (if we’re growing the right things) but they won’t pop out of the ground instantaneously full grown—we still need to nurture sprouts and watch out for weeds, which will also grow faster. As long as we are in the gardening analogy (a scary one for anyone who has seen the movie Being There), let’s not forget light. The physical environment, the actual space we operate in has a profound effect on the way we feel and think, which goes widely unrecognized. Most of our meeting rooms seem to be built like fast food restaurants, as places where you want to do your business quickly and leave. Imagine the differences in having an important conversation in a low-ceilinged, windowless room, in a spacious room with flowers or plants and a view, or outside in a natural setting; with or without food or drink. While our options in an organizational setting may be limited, remembering that we are not machines that can be placed down and expected to run the same anywhere will encourage us to optimize the humanity of our work settings.
The overarching structure of the container is a set of clearly understood and agreed on principles. The integrity of the leader, their walking the talk, is a mirror for this. Without that, we get two conflicting streams of communication—“Its critical to do it this way,” and “I don’t really mean that.” People then vacate, mentally, physically, psychologically. Much of organizational communication has this flavour.
Often these conflicting messages are delivered despite genuine good intention, as a result of naïveté about the depth of habits that need to be confronted in ourselves and others. This is apparent in the widespread cynicism about most “mission statements,” which tend to describe an idealized form of behaviour with no notion of how to get there, or if it is achievable at all in the real world. The proposed directions may be potentially inspiring, but not without a credible process of developing the attitudes and teamwork aspired to. In writing this book I looked at scholarly research on leadership and groups on the Internet and got a big laugh at the following statement (only slightly tweaked to protect the guilty) with my original margin notes in parentheses:
One way to achieve a high level of creativity would be to adopt the notion that all ideas developed in group meetings are “put on the table.” Once “on the table,” the ideas belong to the team, and personal ownership is let go.(Yeah right!) Once personal ownership is let go, the group members can add to or take from the original ideas as needed, and the tendency to want to keep an idea simply because it is “my idea” is released so that the team, not an individual, becomes the designer. (How the hell do they propose to do that?)
What is described here as a “notion” to be “adopted” is actually a hard-won result come to through painful learning and courage. Letting go of a sense of ownership of one’s ideas is no small thing, as academics should know all too well; it is a classic roadblock to a group of high-performing individuals working together. Principles and aspirations alone are never sufficient; if they were, we could realize the world we long for just by wishing. We need practical reminders again and again and again, not because there is anything wrong with us, or because we need to deeply change ourselves, but because we are so used to falling under the sway of our reactions and mistaking them for ourselves, or for an accurate reflection of “the way things are.”
Foto: Douglas Dickel
Text: © 2009-2010 Michael Chender. All rights reserved.
Photos: © 2009-2010 Douglas Dickel. All rights reserved.
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