Principle #3: Reduce attacks on life
The previous two principles focused on what must die; on the other hand, there are also situations that are potentially life-giving, but where the life that wants to emerge risks being thwarted by various forms of attacks. These attacks can take the form of resistance to change, cynicism, power games, desires for control, turf wars, rigid mental models, etc.
How can we reduce these attacks on life, to protect it until it becomes strong enough to emerge? A first step is to be aware of and honest with ourselves, identifying when these attacks come (often unconsciously) from us, even when we ourselves are initiators and promoters of transformation.
Once we have developped this awareness, rather than blaming ourselves, we can choose to welcome these parts of us that are struggling with trusting the life that wants to emerge, and reassure them that other parts of us will be there to help the process.
Some examples of reduction of attacks on life:
- Increasing listening to ourselves and others, to nip those attacks in the bud;
- Sharpening your attention in order to spot attacks on life coming from others around you, including those who might be waving their power and authority in the process – and build and reinforce boundaries in those relationships in order to protect the life that is emerging
- Keeping personal, team and organisational focus on purpose and intention and make sure actions are aligned with them;
- Promoting (re)generative listening and (re)generative speaking as the default mode of interaction in your team;
- Encouraging creative thinking and challenging prejudices, stereotypes, mental models at work in the team and organisation, often embedded in the culture
- Rewarding collaboration and coopetition in the team, whilst discouraging or even sanctioning competition for its own sake and narcissistic competition;
- Promoting collective and participatory decision-making processes;
- Evolving towards delegation and subsidiarity as fundamental operating principles for your organisation, and replacing control with transparency and accountability.
These articles are a bit like our "Advent Calendar". They will appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on our blog, with the next one on 16 December.
The 6 principles of regeneration: Principle #2
Principle #2: Help what needs to die... to die and to "compost", with the aim of fertilising and nourishing the Life that is to emerge. What kind of material are we talking about? For example, it could be past successes or failures, hopes or fears, a project you helped to realise and lead, a role in your organisation, a client, the city you live in... It is about letting die all that comes from the past, but that no longer serves to nourish the new that needs to be born. The process of composting is a good metaphor here: it reminds us that it's not just about saying "it's over" (principle 1), or cutting ourselves off from the past and letting it go rationally - it's about engaging in a process of mourning that will eventually transform what is now dead, into resources for future life.
Examples for this second principle:
- As a team, have debriefing sessions about the mistakes you have made - not to judge each other, but to learn collectively from them and not to let grudges or unspoken facts pollute team life;
- Celebrating and honouring those products and services that brought great joy, pride and revenue in the past, but can no longer be part of the future;
- If you have decided to go down a path of strong strategic reorientation, think of moments, rituals, symbols that honour and celebrate the past but also allow it to be left behind, rather than expecting people to understand and follow new ideas just because they make obvious business sense;
- As a leader in your organisation, connect and share your emotions, (especially sadness and fear) about letting go of what you hold dear from this shared and collective past, even if you find the proposed future very attractive.
Principle #2 is at the service of Principle #1: it helps to process the letting go, the endings, that the latter will inevitably suggest.
These articles are a bit like our "Advent Calendar". They will appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on our blog, with the next one on 14 December.
The model of the 6 principles of regeneration: Principle #1
The model we present to you should be understood as a kind of "Operating System": it consists of a set of principles that should guide every action, every initiative you want to undertake to bring regeneration into your organisation and your life; it provides a coherent framework, a map, that can help you navigate the road ahead and make choices that will boost your organisational vitality.
This model replicates the fundamental truth in all living system: life flows through inseparable cycles of death and birth, one feeding the other. Regenerating oneself, one's team, one's organisation and moving towards a regenerative economy is not only about birthing innovations and generating life, but also about letting go of what can no longer continue, what must die, in the world we have regenerated.
Thus, it is built around two different cycles. Both feed and regulate the flow of life: one works on structuring the 'dying' process of letting go; the other works on structuring the process of the new life asking to emerge.
So below are those 6 principles, the first three relating to the process of "letting go", or death, and the other three to the structuring of the emerging life.
Cycle 1
Structuring the dying process: naming and letting go of what must end
Principle #1: Divest from life-draining processes. What is really life-draining is not so much death itself, rather it is investing energy in keeping alive something that needs to die, to end, to be abandoned.
Here are some examples of processes that suck life and energy out of individual, group and organisations, and some ideas on what to do differently.
At individual level
- Feeding one's "false self" instead of the authentic self: divesting from this type of process means letting go of dysfunctional relationships, unattainable and ungrounded goals that we chase, responding to expectations that have been instilled in us from outside but which do not (or no longer) correspond to what we really want and which do not help the construction of meaning for the organisation to which we belong;
- A stereotyped management style, e.g. inspired by the "carrot and stick", through which we delude ourselves that we are "motivating" our employees, in a world where it is now known that motivation in the medium and long term is found in what people do, in the alignment between external and internal, and that it is not the manager who can inculcate it in any way, but at most can help people to find it;
- Continuing to invest in projects and attend meetings that we know are life-draining (without making an effort to revive them); instead, try to look at reality and identify projects or activities that continue only because no one has the courage to say they should end, and be the one audacious enough to suggest they end
At team and organisational level
- Within your own team and organisation, instead of living in opacity and role ambiguity, bring a culture of transparency, accountability and learning, so that you can spend your energy on tackling real problems, rather than covering up shortcomings;
- Freeing oneself from the dynamics of compensation that lead one to take on someone else's role in order to compensate for their inability to take on that role; instead, learn to give open and respectful feedback, to help colleagues, co-workers and managers to take responsibility, to courageously explore the perimeter of one's own role, and to assume the consequences of one's own actions;
- Stop supporting projects/products/services beyond the initial launch phase, despite evidence that they are not able to sustain themselves and despite clear signals from the target market that they are not aligned with needs;
- In the transition to a regenerative economy, it is important to assess the impact of the various value chains at the heart of your business and to commit to a planned divestment from all activities that degrade ecosystems rather than regenerate them.
In our model, divestment from all those life-draining processes is the first principle: stopping, realising what no longer needs to continue, is the first step towards true transformation. Letting go allows you to free up time and energy that suddenly becomes available and can then be reinvested in life-enhancing processes. Divesting from degrading activities opens up possible spaces for creativity that can lead to inventing new components in your value chain, or even whole new value chains.
WARNING! If you turn up to work one morning and tell your boss, colleagues, suppliers, or clients: “Sorry guys, this is life-draining, I’m going to stop doing it”, chances are that your input will bring much toxicity to the system! So whilst it is important to be clear on the intention, on the direction, you need to adjust your approach so that it becomes, in itself, life-giving. Refrain at all cost from attributing faults to others for the situation you’re in – you will only irritate them and activate their resisting selves. Instead, acknowledge your part in the shared reality, your insights about what feels, to you, life-giving and life-draining, and invite them to share their own perspective in a non-judgemental atmosphere. Using Generative Listening, Generative Speaking, and other Non-Violent Communication tools will be key for the success of your endeavour.
These articles are a bit like our "Advent Calendar". They will appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on our blog, with the next one on 9 December.
The Six Principles of Regeneration
"If we keep doing what we've always done, we'll keep getting what we've always got".
This phrase has never been truer than at this moment, when most of us, in Europe and worldwide, are trying to get out of isolation and face the challenge of restarting our economies post-COVID. Restarting the old industrial machine at full speed in an attempt to recover all the business that has disappeared in recent months is a tempting idea, but one that risks giving us a (false) sense of security, deluding us into thinking that we will soon recover and that everything will be as it was before.
The opening sentence contains a wise warning: continuing to do what we were doing will only produce more of what was already there, setting the stage for an even bigger crisis: environmental, social and economic.
From recovery to regeneration
Indeed, 'recovery' may not be the most useful term to help us think our way forward. 'Recovery' implies a return to a previous state, which was, in many ways, unhealthy and unsustainable. 'Recovery', again, creates the illusion that this last year and a half have been a parenthesis, and that the world may return, when we finally emerge from it, exactly where we left off.
The times call for us to make a bolder choice: a choice that will mobilise us to act with meaning, to regain confidence in ourselves and others, to harness our energy and creativity to build thriving economies that not only protect ecosystems but also help them to flourish. A choice that stimulates our imagination to reinvent the way we do business, a choice that can contemplate the fact that human beings are a part of Nature and not apart from Nature: a choice, therefore, that allows our thriving economies to enrich the ecosystems around us, rather than impoverish them.
This bold choice has a name: it is called Regeneration: of ourselves, our teams and organisations; it means being able to build a new world taking into account Nature, to bring about the regeneration of the ecosystems in which we live.
Nature is the most complex system; Nature is the most thriving system.
Regeneration is the fundamental thrust that drives life processes on Earth. For billions of years now, it has helped life create the conditions for more life, enabling the richness and diversification of the ecosystems that we inhabit. When embracing this historic opportunity of reinventing the way we work together to create and share value, the way we trade, the way we collaborate and compete, in a way that enriches everyone and our ecosystems rather than degrade them, we need to turn to Nature for inspiration, learn from observing Her what systemic patterns enable ecosystems to behave, spontaneously, in such a life-conducive way – and transfer those insights to the organisations we inhabit.
A couple of years ago, in another article, we described the 5 principles that we identified as being at the heart of life processes on Earth and some ideas on how, concretely, to apply them for the regeneration of our personal and organisational ecosystems, thus contributing to the transition to a regenerative economy.
Since then, we have tested these five principles with the organisations we work for. Our work as consultants and facilitators, accompanying numerous organisations, has helped us to discover a sixth principle and enabled us to complete the model for individual, group and organisational regeneration.
These articles are a bit like our "Advent Calendar". They will appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays on our blog, with the next one on 7 December.
5 principles to regenerate: yourself, your team and your organisation
In many areas of organisational life, and beyond, we seem to be stuck, repeating patterns that do not produce situations that we desire. Yet many of us can feel inescapably caught in this pattern-repetition, helpless and powerless about the possibility of generating different experiences and outcomes.
These experiences become manifest in a fractal way:
- They can occur at individual level, for example when I feel caught in a job that is depleted of meaning; when I feel I am being told what to do and how to do it, without any room for me to take up my role in my own creative, generative way; or when I feel clear about taking up my role but find others around me not taking up theirs.
- They can happen at team level, when turnover is too high, leading to an absence of team identity; or because of a sense of ongoing change, which constantly reshuffles the perimeters of our role, tasks, activities, market, and even meaning; or because of short-term targets stifling any attempt at seeing, and working from, the broader, longer-term picture
- Despite all good intentions, we may also generate these kinds of experiences at the level of the organisation itself, through failing to bridge the gap between women and men (in terms of salaries, promotions to executive posts, etc.); adapting too slowly to the dire needs for different ways of working that the younger generations are symbolising; reducing performance (and often, with it, meaning) to a set of quarterly figures; embracing computer-led checks-and-controls and banning human intuition
- And of course, as societies, we are becoming increasingly aware of the cheer unacceptability of continuing business as usual, given its clear causality links with climate and biosphere change, yet are recurrently demonstrating our incapacity, so far, to bring about the necessary changes
Change management in the 80s and 90s, and transformation programmes since, have mostly failed to address the above. If anything, they may have ended up contributing to them. My hypothesis is that they have failed to see and address what is present at all these different fractal levels, one and the same phenomenon that should in fact be the primary target of our efforts: We are living-systems, and the main issue is that Life is leaking out of a hitherto living system.
If that diagnosis holds some truth, then restorative actions aimed at redressing the situation need to address the issue head on. If life is leaking out, we need to reduce the leakage, and help more life come back.
This may not be so difficult – providing we trade our arrogance and presumptuousness of thinking we can be in control of these phenomenon, for a good dose of humility coming from a new awareness that we are only a part of a bigger systemic web: the living world.
It may indeed not be so difficult because bringing life back into a system, creating the conditions conducing to more life, helping the growth and development of vibrant, thriving, living systems: this already has a name – regeneration. And it has been happening for a long long time (millions of years) in the living world; in fact this is why the world is ... living.
When we look at how Life has blossomed on this planet, we can see 5 operating principles:
- Increased interactions between living organisms, and with non-living organisms (light, minerals, etc.)
- Freedom for life to expand where it is asking to blossom
- Reduced attacks on living-systems until they are established
- Death of what is no longer viable, with composting in order to make it available as nutrients for the next cycle
- No external help/input in order to keep something alive; if something is not viable, it won’t grow – only what is viable will grow
So how about trying to seek inspiration from the living ecosystems to bring more life into our psycho-systems and socio-systems? What might regeneration look like if we applied it to ourselves and to our organisations?
Well, the 5 operating principles might now look like this:
- Increase interactions with life-giving people, organisations, and experiences in your environment. This might mean going out of the routine and habits that we have built over time, meeting new people from our industry or, indeed, from completely different walks of life; going on learning journeys as a team, or spend time in a forest, with a skilled guide, to understand how life blossoms here without any gardener; open our offices (not just Reception) to artists, becoming a temporary gallery for them; partner and sponsor innovative organisations; revisit our whole supply chain to bring in more life-giving suppliers and customers – indeed, engage them in creating a “life-giving supply chain”, etc.
- Encourage life where it is asking to blossom. Organise your workload so that you engage with where you feel the energy is for you at the moment; develop those ideas/projects that resonate/ring true for you, where you feel passion, energy, and a sense of calling; facilitate/enable collaboration and risk-taking within the team; as a team, be clear on purpose/intention, and leave the what/how to achieve it, to evolve according to ever-changing circumstances – i.e. don’t get stuck on procedures, rules, regulations, but rather clarify underlying principles; give priority, in your team or as an organisation, to those products, services or actions that can both help your business thrive and be life-giving for the eco and socio-systems around you – in fact, evolve your organisation’s strategy so that, within x number of years, you will only create products, services and actions that both help business and are life-giving for eco and socio-systems (moving, as an organisation, towards being a core element of a regenerative economy is not just regenerative for those eco and socio systems; it is very beneficial in terms of employee satisfaction, well-being, retention, etc.)
- Reduce attacks on life. These can take the form of resistances, cynicism, power games, controlling behaviour, war over territories, fixed mental models, etc. Be true to yourself, and spot when you are engaging in any of those – then rather than beat yourself up about it, welcome those parts of you that are struggling with trusting life to take over, and do what can help you open up to it a bit more; befriend the idea that life is an emerging process, hardly predictable and certainly uncontrollable; keep your focus on purpose and intention, and ensure your actions are aligned with it; promote (re)generative listening and (re)generative speaking as default modes of interactions in your team; encourage creative thinking and well-meaning reciprocal challenges to assumptions and mental models operating in your team; reward collaboration and coope-tition, but discourage or even sanction rivalry; promote collective decision-making processes; evolve towards delegation and subsidiarity as core functioning principles for your organisation, and substitute control with transparency and accountability, etc.
- Help what needs to die … to die and to compost, in order to nourish the emerging Life. This could be your past achievements or failures, your hopes or your fears, a project you helped set up and lead, a role in your organization, a client, the town in which you live… whatever is no longer serving the emerging life that is pushing through in you. Composting is a good metaphor here: it reminds us that this is not about just saying ‘it’s over’, or cutting ourselves from the pain of letting go – it is about engaging in a grieving process that will eventually transform the dying into resources for future life. As a team, hold debrief sessions about your mistakes – not to judge each other, but to learn from them; celebrate those products and services that have brought great joy, pride and revenues in the past but can no longer be part of the future; when your new organizational strategy involves significant reorientation, enable sessions, rituals and symbols that honour the past and leave it behind, rather than just expect people to understand and follow the new ideas because they make business sense; as a leader in/of your organisation, connect to and share your own feelings about letting go of what you held dear of this shared, collective past, even if you find the proposed future very attractive, etc.
- Divest from life-draining processes: what is really life-draining is not the dying itself; it is when we invest energy in maintaining alive something that needs to die. Feeding your false-self rather than your true-self is life-draining, so divest from it; let go of dysfunctional relationships, of ungrounded/unachievable objectives; of waving a carrot or a stick as a manager: if your staff cannot find their own intrinsic motivation in what they do, let it be seen – but it is not your job to motivate them; stop working on those projects or going to those meetings that you know are life-draining (or address the issue and restore life to them); with your team, name those activities/projects that you are keeping alive because no one has the heart to bring up the fact that you should discontinue them; as a team and an organization, embrace transparency, accountability, and organizational learning, so that you can spend your energy addressing the real issues rather than spending it trying to cover up various shortfalls; wean yourself, your team, and your whole organization off dynamics of compensation, whereby we end up taking up someone else’s role because they seem incapable/unwilling to take it up, instead of holding them to account and work with the consequences; or whereby we support projects/products/services beyond the initial launching phase despite evidence that they are not able to self-sustain, etc.
These are all examples, but in my view the most important is to hold on to the principles, and as you’re engaging with a situation that you are intending to regenerate, ask yourself: how can I increase life-giving interactions here? Where/what is the life that is trying to blossom, and how can I encourage it? What are the attacks to life I can notice, and how do I contribute to reducing them? What do I need to divest my energies from, so that I can help what needs to die to actually die and feed the next cycle?
When activated together, you will find that these 5 principles will bring much potency to the regeneration of yourself, your team, and your organisation.
The 3Ds and the 3Cs of transformation
Over the last 18 months, we, at Nexus, have been working on a large scale organisational transformation project with an international organisation. We based our design on Otto Scharmer’s U process, which we have adapted, over years of practice.
In our approach, we put a lot of emphasis on the Sensing phase, to ensure, right from the start, that people really get out of their everyday reality, so that their mind, and their heart, can start being stretched a little. In other words, Sensing, for us, needs to operate at two levels simultaneously:
- Content/data: what am I learning, what am I discovering, what’s the new info, the new trends that I’m picking up, the new insights for me?
- Process/emotions: what is happening to me as I am discovering all this? How am I being touched, being moved, being challenged by it? What, of my assumptions, my mental models, are being challenged by this learning and this discovering?
So with that in mind, we designed a Sensing process that invited the members of our client organisation, from everywhere around the globe, to move out of their bubble, and start Sensing both their Context (the world around them), and their System (their own organisation, and what, in it, felt life-giving or life-draining).
The take-up was good. More than 300 people engaged in authentic dialogue about their lived reality, and about the world around them. At regular intervals, we brought about 50 of them together, to feel the pulse of that Sensing, and gauge how far they’d got, and how much the Sensing itself was already having a transformative effect.
At the second of these “pulse-taking” events, it became clear that not much was actually shifting in their own perception of themselves, and how they operated. Or, to be more precise, any insight felt ‘out there’, disconnected from them; as if the issues they were discussing during those ‘Sensing’ meetings – however pressing and pertinent – only belonged to those discussions, and business as usual could nevertheless continue once those meetings ended.
In other words, Sensing was having no real impact. Yes data and insights were being generated, but there was no bridge from insight to action. Sensing conversations remained intellectual exercises, welcome by some as a breath of fresh air (at last, we’re talking about things!), and perceived by others as a waste of time (we’re busy, why waste our time on these conversations, we’ve had them before and nothing changes).
So was the organisation actually doing Sensing, and it just didn’t work for them? Or was the lack of impact in itself a sign of them not actually engaging in Sensing? And how could we gauge which hypothesis was right?
In grappling with these questions with our client, we came to discover a tool which, since, has proved very useful. We’ve called it the 3 Ds – thus coining the term of 3D-Sensing. Those 3 Ds refer to 3 characteristics that any real Sensing of the reality should demonstrate. And to know whether these are present, it is very simple. Anyone actually engaging in Sensing should feel:
Displaced: as if you’d been uprooted in some way, taken into a different reality – or at least, as the English poet T.S. Eliott would put it, as if you were seeing your own reality for the first time. Sensing is like travelling in some way, and you should be feeling like you’re loosing your bearings somehow; things feel, and taste, a little different; the light that is shining on your reality should create a scenery that you’ve never quite seen before. You should be saying things like: “wow, that’s us?” or “wow, that’s the world around us? I’d never realised it was like this before!”
Disturbed: not feeling so good, because in some way what you held dear in your heart, the things that you thought you knew, are being challenged. Sensing should generate what some people, nowadays, like to call “unlearning”, i.e. the letting go of certain of your beliefs, your assumptions, your mental models about the world, and your place and role in it – in order for new ones to emerge, more in tune with what the Sensing helped you make sense of. And, in turn, this can generate what the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion called “the fear of catastrophic change”: this sense that the solid and reassuring ground of knowledge on which on current functioning had been based, is about to disappear from under our feet – which, as you can imagine, is quite a disturbing feeling
Disrupted: there are some discoveries, some insights that create a “before/after” kind of effect; when nothing will never quite be the same afterwards: removing a plastic straw from a turtle’s nose, or eating an organically grown carrot for example. In some way, Sensing, in and of itself, should have an impact on your behaviour, because the disturbance created by the experience has offered you unmediated data that touches you right at the core of your being – not just intellectually, but also emotionally, and spiritually. In such a way that you won’t want – you simply won’t be able – to return to your previous behaviour for a while (this effect wanes with time, so this is what Sensing need not be a one-off experience, but rather an on-going disposition in our relation to the world). This echoes one of Daniella Meadows’ (a brilliant systems-thinker) 12 leverage points in organisational transformation: direct, unmediated access to data, and in particular to those that highlights the consequences of your own behaviour
As I mentioned earlier, this tool became very useful for this group – and others – helping them gauge whether they were indeed engaging in Sensing or just pretending, so that they were, if needed, able to adjust the types of conversations they were having, using the Generative Speaking framework to challenge one another in a helpful, constructive way.
Since then, I’ve been reflecting more, trying to unpack what may be holding us back from experiencing fully the 3Ds, and my hypothesis at this stage, is that it is the 3Cs that hold us back from being in 3D:
- Comfort: organisational beings have a tendency to seek out stability, predictability, and, consequently, to avoid anything that might displace, disturb, or disrupt them. There are powerful homeostatic dynamics in any living system, many of which are at the service of its survival, so they’re not to be looked down at just because they prefer comfort to transformation. It’s just that we need to be aware that Sensing is not meant to be comfortable, and that, in order to engage with it, we need to be prepared to loosen our desire for comfort a bit.
- Collusion: many of the things we will uncover when we sense our own system’s functioning – if not all of them in fact – are things that we actually do. Not somebody else; no, us. So diving deep into our functioning is bound to shine light on things that we do, problems that we actually collude with. And that, in itself, is particularly uncomfortable, and disturbing. No wonder then why we sometimes stop short of actually engaging in real Sensing, for fear of having to acknowledge our own part in the problem that we seemed, only earlier, so keen to resolve. But as Adam Kahane, the ‘father’ of the Transformative scenario process once quoted in his book about scenarios, when describing difficulties or resistances triggered in participants by an imminent insight of their own collusion with the difficulties they were facing: “if you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution”. So let us not only acknowledge, but perhaps even celebrate, how we are contributing to, or colluding with, the dysfunctional situations we’d like to transform – because that’s a key to transforming them that we got in our hands now.
- Compensation: one particular collusive dynamics that we find in dysfunctional systems is one when some people end up doing what others should be doing, often for fear of the latter failing to actually achieve what they’re meant to do. Rather than calling them to account, and helping them grow into the responsibility of ensuring that they do what their role requires them to do, we tend to do it for them – a behaviour that I like to call ‘compensation’. Sensing tends to shine light on these dynamics, which are particularly uncomfortable because we tend to feel powerless in transforming them, for it would require us to loosen of desire for control, and inject more accountability in the system. In Kleinian terms, it might feel better to be perceived as a good object, an overcompensating good mother doing everything for her little ones, than as a bad object, a stern and demanding father figure.
In conclusion, perhaps we can look at these issues through the lens of Regeneration: if we want to engage in the kind of Transformation that brings new life and energy into our organisational system, Sensing is surely a key step on that journey, as we need to let the world in – as much as needing to open the door and get out into the world – and challenge our own habits, assumptions, and mental models. That journey will need to be a 3D journey, where we accept that being displaced, disturbed and disrupted is a sign of new life flowing through our veins, and to achieve that, we will need to let go and grieve of 3Cs.
Should we wage war on climate?
The signs are there, hardly avoidable; it’s coming our way. Climate change is becoming obvious, its effects already bearing on us, and the science that already told us some decades ago about the phenomenon we are now experiencing is now telling us that we have only a few years to act (20 for the more optimists, 2 for the more pessimists). As I write these few lines, the IPCC has just released yet another report, spelling out even more clearly that time is running out – and fast.
So voices calling for a war on climate are getting louder, and they are making sense on several levels. Yet it is worth stepping back and asking ourselves: would waging war on climate be the catalyst we have been yearning for for so long, or would it be, at best, misplacing our energies, and at worst, likely to worsen the situation?
Well, one of the reasons for recurrent inaction so far is the lack of perceived immediate threat; so introducing the language of war would heighten that sense of threat, which we can hope will be a greater trigger for action. In relation to Covid-19, this is the strategy that French President Emmanuel Macron chose to introduce the first lockdown of our recent history, with his famous “we are at war!”.
Entering a war on climate may also prove to be a uniting option for world leaders that have shown so far to be so divided, it echoes archetypal stories of humanity uniting against extra-terrestrial invaders. And perhaps the most recent IPCC report may feel like this global threat that we would be foolish not to unite to fight. Although the short-lived media coverage may suggest that the threat has not been felt with the required intensity…
Finally, the Second World War is a good example of what can be achieved where, in the name of the ‘war effort’, we divert a whole economy towards a single, exceptional purpose. If ‘climate effort’ won’t do it, perhaps ‘war effort’ will? A very recent example has, indeed, been the huge mobilisation for the economy in this pandemic, and Macron’s framing of it with his “we are at war!” most certainly laid down the foundations for the appropriate measures to be taken without any objection from the rest of the political spectrum.
The rhetoric of war, however, brings with it its own problems. Yes it fuels our motivation by mobilising our sense of omnipotence, but isn’t our sense of omnipotence, over nature more particularly, part of the very problem we are trying to solve? We’ve seen what a sense of omnipotence does in the past, as the old joke reminds us: the “war on drugs” seems to have been followed by more drugs, the “war on terrorism” by more terrorism; the “war on unemployment” by more unemployment… what if the “war on climate change” generates greater climate change?
The language of war, and that sense of induced omnipotence, bring also with them the need for “weapons”. Far from trying to reduce, or “substract”, as Leidy Klotz explains in his wonderful book, the very sources of disequilibrium that our industrial activities have produced, the creativity around weapons in this war on climate tend to be, unfortunately, generated by the same mindset that has produced the problems we are trying to deal with: more technology, more industrial inventions, more interference with Nature. A few examples of those are: spraying sulfur massively in the atmosphere, to filter out some of the Sun; CO² capturing and burying into the ground; hydrogen as the next generation of energy …
These ideas are not only misguided and dangerous; they are also missing the point: indeed, by saying climate (change) is the enemy, we are making out that it is something external to us, coming at us like a hungry lion would towards a group of tourists lost in the savannah. Yet climate change is anything but disconnected from us; it is the result of our behaviour as a human species, just like the music that you hear is the result of the orchestra’s behaviour, or the mess in your living room the result of your own lack of tidying up discipline. Hailing it as the enemy out there misplaces the source of the phenomenon, and tends to treat the symptoms rather than the causes. And the causes are now very clear: our economies that have grown to be highly degrading and degenerative, based on the “Take-Make-Use-Lose” linear thinking that have been running down Earth’s life-supporting systems for decades, oblivious to the impact of both our gluttony for Earth’s resources, and the toxicity of our outputs.
If war is the answer, and a successful war is one that targets the real causes, then should we wage war on ourselves, then? Of course not, this would be self-destructive. Yet paradoxically, our current behaviours are, in ways that are becoming clearer and clearer, essentially self-destructive. How can we resolve these dysfunctional psychodynamics?
Well, psychology could be of help here, and, in particular, recent developments in integral psychology, which are showing us that rather than pushing out our unwanted symptoms (anxiety, anger, shame, etc.), we can be much more potent in transforming our experience when we start welcoming them as part of us, without judging them. Welcoming those immature parts of our personality underlying those symptoms and holding them in love is much more likely to bring about the very psychological maturation we are seeking, than putting our energy in judging, condemning, and trying to ban them.
Some cancer patients too report that their experience of their illness shifted when they stopped relating to their tumour as some outside invader colonising their body, which then has to be attacked through powerful chemicals; but rather connected to it being a part of themselves that is behaving in a way that has become misaligned with their intentional being.
So the question remains: should we wage war on climate?
Well, what is sure is that we have to act: completely, wholeheartedly, and to an unprecedented scope, where the whole of our economies and of our behaviours on this planet need to be transformed. If war is what will mobilise you to act, then so be it.
But remember two things: 1) war is meant to be the last thing to do, when everything else you have tried has failed; and 2) the biggest challenge is not to make war, but to make (long-lasting) peace. Peace with Nature, peace with the fact that we are a part of Nature, and not apart from It; and peace with ourselves.
So, perhaps we should forget about war, and declare peace with Nature.
Generative Speaking: The other most powerful transformational behaviour
How can you “tell your truth”, whilst at the same time preserve the conditions for constructive dialogue and engagement at work? How do you manage to remain faithful to yourself – and what you think and feel – yet find a way of coming across that enhances collaboration rather than runs the risk of destroying it? How do you say your piece without self-censorship, in a way that engages others rather than drives them away?
Even when the 7 principles for Generative Listening are diligently applied, these questions pervade many relationships at work, and yet they are rarely dealt with in a satisfactory manner. More often than not, we think that if we were to really say what we feel or think, it would damage, or destroy, the current status quo in the relationships; create intractable conflicts, and alienate some of the stakeholders – including ourselves. The fear of self-alienation, or of creating fragmentation, prevents many from saying what really goes on inside of them; of sharing their true perspective on the situation at stake.
Others, on the contrary, just “tell it like it is”, seeking fragmentation and polarisation as a way to function or even to rule.
Transforming our mental model of conversation, from debate to dialogue
What both approaches share is a mental model that truth-telling generates fragmentation, and that this can’t be avoided. It is based on yet another mental model, one that sees debate as the only form of productive conversation.
My many years as an organisational consultant have shown me that there is another way. Far from manipulation techniques, there is a way to be fully present in the conversation, whilst not only inviting but also enabling others to be present too, in a way that makes everyone feel they are part of the same whole – the same enquiry into a shared phenomenon: this is what I call Generative Speaking.
Generative Speaking starts with being present to myself first, and in that way starts with the 7th principle of Generative Listening. If I want to speak my truth, I have to know my truth. So I need to constantly check, in truth: how am I feeling at this stage of the conversation, and why am I feeling this?
On that basis, Generative Speaking is about truly responding to what others have just said, not waiting my turn to speak so that I can say something that I came up with 10 or 15 minutes ago. Generative Speaking happens in the here and now, where the past (my thoughts/ideas/perspectives before others spoke) meets the present (what has just been said) in order to build the future through this conversational intercourse.
Sterile and destructive speaking
Though I had been aware for a while of the importance of the quality of the conversation in producing excellent outcomes in work situations, the centrality of Generative Speaking came to me as a flash of insight some years ago, in a high-stake meeting, actually because of its very absence.
Picture this: the CEO of a newly merged investment platform has commissioned our firm to facilitate the merger of these two separate, national platforms into a single European one. We have agreed to coach mixed project teams to develop a vision of the competitive advantage this new platform can bring, and prototype new products and business initiatives to make it a reality.
In a specific meeting convened to hear back from the project teams, the CEO listens to the proposals presented to him, and responds in ways that simply close down the conversation, and shatters the motivation of those who had volunteered to engage in the project teams. His main mistakes?
- Staying mostly with “I like”, “I don’t like”: the issue, certainly at this stage of the conversation which is about receiving the work produced, is not about liking an idea but rather a) making sure I’ve understood it and b) testing whether it makes business-sense. By responding only with liking or not liking, the CEO doesn’t open up the necessary avenue for refining the proposed prototype and exploring how to integrate it in the current portfolio
- Working with untested assumptions: by many of his comments, it became clear to us (who had worked with the project teams) that the CEO didn’t actually fully understand what they were proposing, and was rather reacting to them based on many untested assumptions. As a result, a good part of the conversation was built on shaky foundations, when a little bit of humility would have prompted him to ask for clarification and therefore ensure the foundations were healthy
- “It won’t work”: another common response from him was to blatantly declare that the proposed solutions wouldn’t work. No engagement around what seemed to be missing, what triggered questions for him, about how they had thought about addressing this or that issue – no, only, here again, a judgement that closed down any further mutual exploration, leaving barely a space for advocating and convincing, two processes commonly used in debate
So by this stage in the meeting, we had a deflated set of project teams, growing convinced that the co-creative approach was only a façade, behind which sat a ruling, temperamental patriarch; and we were no further in the development of value-adding, motivating initiatives aimed at making this merger a success.
Luckily, we quickly spotted this dysfunctional pattern of interactions, and were able to make swift changes in the facilitation of the rest of the meeting, so that it eventually did produce the expected outcomes.
A framework for Generative Speaking
The guidelines we made up on that particular day have evolved, through our practice of hundreds of organisational conversations (some of them a real success, others wonderful failures), into what I regard as a foundational framework for Generative Speaking:
This framework is designed to enable anyone involved in a meeting, a workshop, a performance review or a sales negotiation, to play their part in the quality of the conversation they are having by responding from one of four positions, regardless of their role in the organisation. It is organised in a matrix form, differentiating what is present in what I heard from what isn’t, and what enriches the emerging picture from what obscures it:
- Position I: What I understand you say, what is clearer for me now. This is the traditional position of reformulation, aimed both at checking your own understanding and at conveying to others that you have been listening attentively to what they were saying. Beyond that, it is a way of continually defining common ground based on shared meaning. It doesn’t mean that you have to agree with them, but at least these are the points you are all clear on. Rather than sharing his personal value judgement on what he liked or didn’t like, this is where the CEO in the above vignette should have started responding from.
- Position II: What I don’t understand, what still needs clarifying. Directly linked to principle 6 of Generative Listening, this is a time for consolidating the ground on which you are walking in the conversation so that what ensues doesn’t rest on shaky foundations. Again this is a way of showing that you have really been listening, and yet been unable to catch the meaning being conveyed. By bringing it up, it can actually help others refine their own thinking through finding other words to put their point across. It may require a bit of humility if you would prefer to not present yourself as not-understanding, but experience has shown me that genuine humility at this stage reinforces the relationship. Position II is one that the CEO in the story, sadly, didn’t dare to visit initially, and needed time to enter into.
- Position III: New ideas triggered by what you said – though not present in what you said. Often as you listen to people (or indeed read an article!), and let your mind wander, new, creative thinking emerges. This is precious and must not be left to simply dissipate, though at the same time it is crucial to acknowledge that those who spoke didn’t come up with these ideas – and therefore don’t necessarily agree with them. When you don’t acknowledge it, and behave as if they said it just because you had the thought when they were speaking, you introduce assumptions into the conversation that may come back to haunt you later, threatening to derail the alliance that was emerging so far. At the same time, if you had these ideas when others spoke, maybe it is because there was, in their speaking, parts of the idea that popped in your mind. By acknowledging your new idea, you may then bring that awareness to them and then truly claim shared meaning.
- Position IV: What to me seems crucial but am not hearing you mention. Position IV is probably the most important, the one that can bring people closer rather than drive them away. At the beginning of the meeting, that position was badly missing in the above CEO’s behaviour, and consequently driving his project teams away. However, his “I don’t like”, or “it can’t work” hinted to something more, if only you looked close enough. Indeed, a simple question was able to unveil it – the question ‘Why?’: Why don’t you like it, or why do you think it won’t work? When asked, he was able to express important concerns about certain key “big-picture” parameters that seemed to be absent from the proposals, and about financial viability where he felt that other elements were not being factored in. Once expressed, they opened the door for the project teams to respond, and for the conversation to enter a truly Generative space. The learning here is that if you feel compelled to react with similar “I don’t like, it won’t work, it doesn’t make sense”, etc., ask yourself first: why do I think/feel that? What to me seems crucial, but I am not hearing it being mentioned? And respond from that space...
Transformation: from fragmentation to Wholeness
The 7 principles for Generative Listening, and now this framework for Generative Speaking, are, in my experience, the two most powerful transformational behaviours, in that they work at bringing wholeness and integration, and thus ultimately not just collective intelligence, but also collective potency – i.e. the capacity of the whole to act with its powerful collective force.
They transform not only the content on which we base our analyses and our decisions, through developing a more complete, more integrated, more pertinent picture of the whole of the situation. But they also transform the social process that produces that picture, from a debating, arguing, antagonistic process to a curious, enquiring, collaborative and integrative one, which actually creates a lived experience of Wholeness. And it is precisely that lived experience of Wholeness that releases the collective potency.
If at first it may feel cumbersome to have to think of the 7 principles, and of the framework, just remind yourself of the process by which you learnt to ride a bicycle. At first it feels like an alien machine, and then, after hours and hours of practice, suddenly it happens: you no longer trying to move this machine, for it is now moving you ...
Generative Listening: the single most powerful transformational behaviour
Listening
Though crucial for authentic Dialogue, true listening does not come naturally. It is an art that requires practice and a specific disposition, so that both speaker and listener connect in such a way that meaning can truly flow through them (as suggested by the Greek root of the word, dia-logos, “meaning flowing through”).
And the dance of meaning-building at the heart of authentic Dialogue starts with a first step: Listening.
When it comes to listening, Generative Listening holds the greatest potential. More than deep, or active listening, Generative Listening enables a level of connection between the one who speaks and the one who listens that is truly generative, i.e. it creates new possibilities for action that neither parties had thought of or even expected before starting the conversation.
Through my practice as an organisational consultant, I have developed 7 principles for Generative Listening:
- Slowing down and noticing more of what is present: often as we enter a conversation (especially in an organisational context), we come filled with thoughts, ideas, or concerns related to what just happened earlier today, or what is scheduled to happen just after this conversation. This first principle invites us to enter the present moment, and slow down all this mental activity linked to past and future
- Listening with all my senses: we could be forgiven for thinking that listening only involves the ears. But in fact all our other senses are important in the act of listening. Sight of course, for it helps us read body language – another crucial conveyor of meaning. But expressions such as “what I heard left me with a bitter”, or “I warmed up to him after listening to this”, or even “this situation doesn’t smell right” shows how much all of our senses are involved in connecting to a reality that we are hearing. In fact, by heightening our 5 senses, we also reduce our often hyperactive cerebral cortex, thus managing to listen not only with our head, but also with our heart
- Listening to the words / images chosen: speaking is like painting with words; as we speak, we choose (even if sometimes unconsciously) specific words – and not others – to paint a picture of the reality we are attempting to describe. As a listener, it is crucial to notice those words, the images they convey, the power (or dullness) that they hold, so that we really try to inhabit that world that is being described. Attention must be placed on unusual words, or slips of the tongue, for they too convey an important meaning about the speaker’s inner world, and the mental models that may be structuring his thinking and his actions
- Listening to the emotions conveyed by the person who is talking: emotions are the bedrock of a person’s presence in the world, the roots of someone’s mental models, thoughts, and actions. Listening fully, or even listening to the full person in front of me, requires me to listen to the emotions (s)he conveys. This can be through body language and the choice of words and images (see above), but it will also be through the tone of the voice, its tempo, its pitch; through the silences as well as the hesitations
- Suspending judgement: this is probably one of the most difficult of these 7 principles, yet probably one of the most crucial. It means suspending both moral and cognitive judgement. By moral judgement, I mean splitting into good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, mature or immature, etc. For a true, authentic dialogue, this moral judgement needs to be suspended whilst I am listening, so that I can truly get into the lived experience of what it is like to be the person who’s speaking. It doesn’t mean that I have to agree with it, or accept it; just that I let it coexists with my own perspective. If you are still not convinced, try to imagine being judged as you speak – your perspective, and who you are, not being allowed into this space of Dialogue ... Equally, it is important to suspend my cognitive judgement, i.e. my tendency to classify or dismiss what I am hearing into true and false, new thinking or old thinking, right-wing or left-wing, etc. As well as my tendency to finish someone’s sentence for them, as if I knew before they spoke what they are actually going to say
- Noticing what I don’t understand or what triggers questions for me, rather than what I don’t like about what I hear. I would argue that we greatly underestimate how much we don’t actually understand in what someone is telling us. Working often in international context, I have come to observe that the greatest misunderstandings happen between people who speak the same language, and not those who are trying to express themselves through a foreign language. So checking my understanding rather than working on assumptions and shortcuts in meaning is crucial. If I come to feel that I don’t like what I am hearing, rather than dismissing it, this is the time to check that I have understood correctly – rather than jumped to conclusions – and if the feeling continues, use it to clarify what questions it raises for me rather than stay in a place of judgement
- What do I feel as I listen to what is being said – and why? Finally, just as it was crucial to tune to the feelings of the one who is speaking, it is fundamental to connect to my own feelings as I am listening. On the one hand, it may provide useful information into the reality being presented. On the other hand, it is a prerequisite before the second act in Dialogue: Generative Speaking. If I don’t pay attention to the feelings that have been evoked by what I heard, I will not be able to constructively respond to what I heard; instead, I will merely act out my inner state, thus putting the Dialogue at risk
For some of my clients, and at times for me too, Generative Listening has been the single most powerful tool in enabling the organisational transformation they were looking for. The complete shifts in the way organisational members related to one another generated a huge release of meaning, energy, creativity, and, at times, healing. As leaders started embodying their role primarily through listening rather than through controlling and/or giving advice, the whole dynamics at work moved towards collaboration and engagement, leading to new ways of working together, new activities, and new sources of performance.
For others, whilst Generative Listening proved to be a crucial first step in the dance, they realised they were still in need of some tools or processes to help them speak to one another authentically; to be able to bring up tough issues without breaking down the quality of the Dialogue.
So I started working with them on Generative Speaking ...
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have got it all wrong
We are at a crucial point in the history of humanity. We know what the problem is: our human activities, since the start of the industrial revolution, have increasingly degraded our living environments, which has led to climate change (global warming, more frequent and more violent hurricanes, flooding, extreme forest fires…) and to the erosion of biodiversity around the world.
We also know what the solutions will need to look like, will need to involve: starting from now, and into the future, our human activities will need to work in symbiosis with natural ecosystems, rather than against them. In fact, given the breadth of our impact on Nature so far, our human activities will need to do more than that; more than preserve Nature, more than being “sustainable”: they will also need, to some extent, to contribute to restoring some of the natural capital that we have spent, some of the ecosystems that we have eroded even though we, humans, depend on them for our own survival.
Our human activities will therefore need to be REGENERATIVE.
The task at hand may seem daunting, impossible. The scope of the transformations required may feel so overwhelming that it might be easier to minimise the actual problem, or to seek an escape from it, however wild they may sound, i.e. flying to Mars and start a new human colony there.
In the early 60s, when JFK set the aim of landing a man on the Moon, everyone thought it would be impossible. Yet his Intention galvanised his country, and soon
many efforts converged from all sorts of fields to engage in an unprecedented display of collective intelligence, leading to Neil Armstrong’s moon-landing in 1969.
Today, we’re at such a “Moon moment”. Yet Bezos, Musk et al. have it all wrong. The star we need to reach for is not out there, external to us. It is inside of us. We need to pull together and be creative in order to transform what we produce and how we produce it – rather than build spaceships in order to continue producing what we’ve always produced just so that we can take it with us to another planet.
As humans, we have great, renewable energies inside of us: intelligence, creativity, solidarity, empathy, a capacity to collaborate with others, etc. It is time we apply those to meet the greatest challenge humanity has to face, and discover how we can, together, transform our businesses into regenerative businesses.
And for that, there is good news: some regenerative businesses already exist and are having beneficial impact, combining value creation with the restoration of natural ecosystems.
So stay tuned, for we, Nexus, are going on a journey around the world to meet them and discover what they do and how they do it, and we will be sharing those stories with you so that more and more people can be inspired by these examples.
Soon, a critical mass of businesses will start shifting towards becoming regenerative and, suddenly, that inner Moon we are seeking won’t feel out of reach after all.