June | 2019 | Sylvia's Journal

Archive for June, 2019

Exchange

Published June 28, 2019 Uncategorized 2 Comments

The day after I returned from South Africa, the work at home picked up to a frantic pace. We had 5 days left to get our house ready for 5 total strangers to move in for a week. We started preparing for that earlier this year by tackling the big projects, such as rehabbing the bathroom upstairs, cleaning kitchen cabinets, decluttering. Now, with only a few days left the to-do list had ballooned to 50 tasks – mostly small, but all consuming.

On Thursday, by the time we closed the doors behind us, just hours before the family would arrive, I was exhausted, but pleased. The house looked like a dream. I would have killed to come from the Colorado mountains and (having arrived in the dark), and wake up to Lobster Cove at its best on a 10+ day.

The home exchanges this summer (there are 3), are a pilot for something more serious – a paid for summer rental while we retreat to a (much cheaper) summer rental further north or west. This we see in our not too far future. While our house and surroundings are being enjoyed by others, we are moving in with our daughters, three days in Easthampton and four days in New Hampshire, where, for the first time ever, we will celebrate Tessa’s birthday (July 2) in her home.

Attunement

Published June 21, 2019 On the road Leave a Comment
Tags: South Africa

A trip to South Africa took 7 days, nearly half of which was in transit. It’s one of those endless flights (from Atlanta to Johannesburg), where you have to remind yourself that the flight will eventually end. I tried to get myself upgraded on the way out there (failed), but succeeded on the wat home. The return flight was nearly 16 hours, two hours longer than the outbound one. Still, even in B-class the flight seemed endless.

I worked for just over a day with a dis-attuned team. I like the word dis-attuned better than all the other labels (dysfunctional disarrayed, problematic, toxic), because there is the promise of music in the word. Dis-attuned suggests that the team is not in harmony, each playing their own tune. During interviews with each before my trip I explored what music they were trying to make, what was on the sheet music in front of them. Once I knew, I could understand the dis-attunement. They were playing altogether different tunes. No wonder the melody didn’t come through.

The retreat was partially about the team getting its work done and partically about its leadership, collectively and individually. I have simplified my definition of leadership – a leader is simply an aware human being. Being aware applies as much to myself as to the other. It means that we can catch ourselves when our intent and impact don’t match. Being aware means that we recognize when we are sabotaging ourselves, when our egos get in the way. Being aware also means that we see the humanity in the other, behind the labels, judgments, professional persona, representative of this or that class/tribe/organization/culture, etc.

Working on all this is how we spent the day and a quarter. When I left to fly home, on the interminable long flight to Atlanta, then Boston, the team was at least able to hear the tunes the others were playing, not quite attuned, but a little bit closer.

Nearly ’round

Published June 16, 2019 On the road Leave a Comment

There is a circle in the making. It’s turning out rather big, but not quite round, and not even a real circle as it isn’t closed. It is more like my 3 year old granddaughter’s attempt at a circle, the two ends, not ends when you think of a circle, coming close to each other, or maybe intersecting, missing their mark of becoming a circle.

This is how my professional life tries to become a circle. I started re-reading authors who I had to read in the first few years as a student in psychology, people like Kegan, Klein, Freud, Bowlby, Adler, Erikson, Skinner, Thorndike. All of them had shaped the field of psychology and so I had to learn about them and then there was always a test. I did pass all the tests because I was good at memorizing. During the first few years of my study there were no videos, no collaborative projects, no experiential learning except for Physiology 101 where I had to dissect a frog, and stand on a block that was pulled from under me while a camera took the picture of my falling to record my reflexes kicking in.

The lectures, with 149 other students, in giant lecture halls were didactic, my studying was based on memorizing facts and frameworks. Development in pedagogy since then recognized that this was learning in an incomplete way. Facts and theories, without getting them anchored in personal experience, simply float away over the year. For years, I wondered whether I had wasted 7 years by picking a study that I could not use in my professional life as a program officer in international development. But that turned out to be a premature conclusion.

45 years, after my studies began I was offered an opportunity to learn to become a coach. I was hardly enthusiastic. I always had liked to work with groups, as a teacher, a trainer or a facilitator. Coaching individuals didn’t appeal that much to me. But the offer was too good to let pass – my employer was willing to pick up the tab, and so I said yes.

Learning to coach is first and foremost a learning journey into the self. It required for me to become aware of my behavioral patterns and determine which ones were helpful and which ones were not if I was serious about coaching. Coaching individuals pushed me into a new orbit of learning and re-discovery. And so, 7 years after this journey started, here I am re-reading classic texts from my psychology studies and connecting the dots. I am recognizing that the call for vulnerability from Brené Brown is great, but it is not for everyone as I am learning in my early ventures into group and team coaching. And now I am on my way to South Africa to explore and discover some more.

Convergence ahead

Published June 2, 2019 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Yesterday we completed the second in the series of Easthampton Futures, working in and with the space created two weeks ago, and perfected on Friday. We spent most of Friday getting the space ready, checking off the multiple tasks, made the necessary purchases and got to know our fellow crew members for this event.

If the first session was about discovery and sensemaking, this one was about possibilities and prototyping, initiating the shift from divergence to convergence: we worked down from a 60000 foot view of a preferred future to about 5000 ft, making the contours of possible paths down to the valley more visible.

I was a little disappointed in the turnout. I had hoped that the buzz created by the first event would propel more people towards Eastworks – the converted mill building where all sessions take place. It was, just like last time, a glorious Saturday after a week of rain. Given the dismal spring we have had so far, I cannot blame people to want to be outdoors rather than indoors thinking about the future. It is the one time that we think of a sunny weekend day as a problem.

Still, it was an inspired and energy-filled day during which I daresay, everyone learned at least one new thing. I learned from than one. Sita introduced all of us to a framework (the Futures Cone) that is a huge improvement on the way I have most often seen ‘futures’ envisioned (essentially a linear extrapolation from the present, or what sometimes goes for a prediction). By the way, the only people I know of who have ever successfully predicted the future were Da Vinci, Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law) and Kurzweil. The rest of us earthlings have done so rather poorly.

The Futures Cone is a tool to help think about possible futures, plausible futures, probably futures and preferred futures. I led a small group, using this tool, to think about these various futures as it related to the intersection of arts & culture on the one hand, and space, environment, resources (natural, energy, human, etc) and sustainability on the other. We spent 45 minutes building on each other’s ideas and easily finding a convergence towards a series of paths forward. It was such a productive conversation that I cannot imagine how we’d gotten to a similar place in any other way.