Hack:
Radical Proposal for Knowledge to Drive Innovation

Alright, Ellen, here we go!  (I'm answering the first four)

 1. “Have you seen this (people asking for help on their own stuff) diminish when the setting is unsafe through tone that attacks people, or increase in healthy circles? “

 Absolutely.  We all operate with a certain level of learned and conditioned defensiveness.  In fact, defending is an important early skill, I believe, and its effect is exacerbated or lessened through safety.  Why would I ask you for help if you have already put me or my work down?  Ellen, you might want to check out research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard referenced in the Team Trust Survey hack. She differentiates safety from trust, and her research is pretty definitive that team learning is greatly enhanced in safe settings. Why is this?  Because people can talk about and resolve two things:  problems (barriers that others might be responsible for) and mistakes (issues that bear on my own or others’ competence).  If I feel I cannot talk about what is a problem for me (e.g., ask for help) or bring up mistakes (e.g., ask for help again!), I’m not likely to learn. Instead, I’m like to retreat to whatever defensive strategy has worked for me in the past, such as avoiding, blaming, confronting, critiquing, acting out emotionally, etc.  My experience as a facilitator has been that one person’s defensive strategy triggers others, so in a team setting, one person’s defensiveness can potentially stop a whole team’s potentials cold.

 2. “How do you define truthful and supportive feedbacks?” 

 This is the 64 thousand dollar question.  To me, this defines the container for talking about something most people in teams have a hard time with: talking to each other about each other.  We’re all pretty good at talking about others when the person is not present.  There, we feel we can be truthful.  But not with the person, who we might offend or from whom we might suffer some repercussion (including that my feedback won’t do any good.)  Can appreciation co-exist with criticism?  I believe it can, but many things need to be present. It’s not a simple answer. But I will bring it down, for now, to two qualities I think are especially important: 

• Empathy
• My own willingness to acknowledge blind spots (things I don’t know and don’t see about myself)

 Regarding empathy.  Disclosure can be an act of real helpfulness and humility.  It may or may not be reciprocated. That’s something I have to deal with, but if I can understand how my criticism or advice is likely to be heard by you and accept that and work with it, not against it, or try to bypass it, staying with you and being on your side as a person, it’s possible my truth will be heard. No guarantees. This means at a certain level I have to believe in you and your possibilities as much as I believe in mine. I don’t just shout my truth or use words that will alienate you.  I don’t zing you to show you how hurt or damaged I am.  As Karen Tse, leader of International Bridges to Justice (an anti-torture organization) says of her own spiritual growth, “You must find the Christ or Buddha in each person and work with that Christ or Buddha.”  It may or may not be a spiritual matter for the sender and receiver, but I find this particularly good advice.  What it means to me is talking to the absolute best in a person, not the worst.  And I don’t think that is possible without empathy for their experiences, heritage, situation, and conditioning as a person. We may be damaged or immature.  We’re sure as heck imperfect.  The “Christ” or “Buddha” may lie wrapped and hidden in all that conditioning.  The question is always, how best can that Self be invited forward?

On blindspots. As to the willingness to see my own blind spots, I think that’s also an essential aspect.  Most of the time, what I share with another person is at best a hypothesis about them.  And hypotheses are notoriously self-serving. They can be hugely patronizing. My view could be nothing more than projection, especially if another person is irritating me or getting under my skin in some way.  I must believe that self-knowledge is an endless quest.  There’s always more to learn; there will always be moments of discomfort when I confront myself.  So, it isn’t just a matter of getting past someone else’s defensive system to tell them the truth; it’s also a matter of getting past my own.  I have to listen and reflect also to find out how I am involved and what my genuine intentions are, while similarly crediting theirs.  When people are committed together to getting past their defensive structures, they are naturally supportive to each other.  And that’s the essence, to me, of a relationship that works, and from which each person grows.

 3.  “Would you agree that the brain houses all of these (thinking, feeling, sensory, intuitive) and is fully operational, only when these traits integrate and operate well?"

 Yes, I think that is right, Ellen.  I tend to use terms like Self as code for this kind of integrated functioning. I know that a lot of amazing change can happen with people, if we create the conditions, as I listed them in my first response.  But here’s a dilemma.  I think you can offer those conditions, but I don’t think you can create them and then put people in them and say, you are now here, behave in ways that are fully integral.  It only works when people choose to be part of that environment.  Choice is an amazing aspect of integration to me and really delicate.   There’s a connection to freedom here, and also growth.  In terms of innovation, it isn’t just the condition of the workplace in which people are brought together, I believe, it’s also the nature of the invitation.  That “Christ” or “Buddha” responds to invitation only, not control, not even persuasion.  As soon as competition sets in or peer pressure, I think we begin to lose the full capabilities of the person.  To me, the assumption that full functioning is what happens under pressure isn’t really different from an old school view of carrots and sticks for people.  It just changes where the carrots and sticks come from.  In that sense, the move from hierarchy to wirearchy isn’t necessarily a shift in the culture at all, if the background belief is that people need to be pushed rather than invited in the right way to deliver their best work.

 4.  “What does it take to facilitate a circle in ways that answer questions important to people, and make it more about them and their ideas than about your counter ideas?"

 So, “invited in the right way” is a key phrase for me.  What I think it takes is asking each person for their own insights in an open-ended and appreciative way, just exactly as you are doing here.  If a person does not carry a question or the question they are asked to carry is not important to them, they’ll go work on something else.  So the first task is to really find out what that central personal question is, to make it explicit, and work to refine it until the person says, “yeah, that’s it.”  An interior bell has gone off.  The group isn’t there to tell the person their question is wrong or what to do about it.  The group is there to ask good questions that help the person tap their own resources and bridge to other ways of seeing, often by releasing some set of implicit, very deep assumptions. 

 At a seminar, for example, a man was considering applying for a job as a college president, but he was undecided.  Friends had told him it was not for him, a set-up or a sell out, and something he wouldn’t succeed at.  But at the seminar, someone asked him about himself and how he grew up.  He said, “Well, I grew up in a migrant family.  I didn’t have a lot of friends.  I moved from place to place and didn’t play on any football or baseball teams. And always, above the crop or orchard, there was the big white house of the owners on the hill.  The questioner continued with him, gently asking, “So are you thinking of the presidency like that big white house on the hill?” He thought for a moment and broke into a big smile.  “That’s a very interesting question!”  (He’s now, very successfully, the college president). 

 In other cases, meaningful coincidences occur.  People see things, find things, meet others who seem especially qualified to help them. The hear something on television that sparks an insight related to their quest.   But the question has to be deep enough for this to work.  When people are working on their own important stuff the community around them naturally comes in to help.  Her stuff is not my stuff.  My stuff is not his stuff.  Under these conditions people help, without competing, and in so doing each person gains and powerful synergies are discovered.  The community emerges almost as a secondary effect.

 The Quakers have a tradition around this type of work, called clearing committees, in which a person is only asked questions by a group of colleagues – questions they do NOT know the answer to. (That would be an interesting experiment to try on MIX!)  A friend who is a facilitator told me recently about some work with a clearing committee in which a woman needed to answer one of these vital self oriented questions. One of the members of the group, enabling deeper work, told the "subject" to try answering it in Spanish rather than English because he could tell that her question had a cultural side to it that wasn’t coming through.  No one in the group knew Spanish except the woman with the question.  When she tried it that way, she gained insight.  It didn’t matter whether anyone in the group was there to give her a better answer than she could find on her own. This, to me, is the best kind of innovation.  I don’t even have to understand your answer.  It may not be in my language.  But it’s a breakthrough.  And the community benefits. What I have to understand is only how to invite you in the right way to answer your own question.  If we think of it this way, the conditions become more obvious. Perhaps:

I respect your right to focus on your dilemma as you respect my right to focus on mine

I don't think my answer is better than yours

I don't ask questions  as a way to give you my answer

It's a privilege for me to be asked by you to help you with your dilemma

I treat you with deep respect and feel honored to work together

It gets richer and more complex as we add feedback into the mix, above and beyond the questions and the support of a clearing committee kind of exchange.  But if we start from principles such as the ones I've listed, when we are ready to move into that more directive mode, I believe  we can come at it from our own most integrated places.  And THEN, when as a team or community we understand and have experienced how this works, how deeply appreciative it is, we can begin to also ask ourselves about our common mission and how best to achieve it.  And that's like coming home.  And its the home of innovation.  I know I've posted it elsewhere on MIX, but can't help but do it again here, that first verse from William Stafford's poem, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:

If you don't know the kind of person I am

And I don't know the kind of person you are

A pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Stafford is saying there isn't going to be any real innovation without getting to know who we each are.  That's quite a thought.

 This is more than enough for today.  What an incredible, insightful set of questions, Ellen.  I certainly feel I’m living my own theory here with you, and that's pretty sweet! You are a gift, Ellen.  I apologize for taking up so much space on your hack. I do hope it is interesting to you.

Thanks for this

Dan