And we're back...

After a pause in activity while domestic matters took precedence, I am back to work on this research.

Here are some further thoughts:

We construct our identity and sense of self as individual, separate from the rest of the world; I and Not I; as a necessary step in becoming ourselves. Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge became aware of their nakedness – which meant their separation from God. Our first nine months of life spent in the womb are an experience of complete connection, but paradoxically, our emerging consciousness knows only I – everything is I. Only on emergence into the world do we gradually begin to encounter the separation of I from Not I and realise that others are able to do as they please rather than only meet our needs. So from the moment the cord is cut, we begin a journey of making sense of our connectedness to the world. For some, this becomes an insatiable search for reconnection, to meet the need to be seen, heard, accepted, loved and held, in spite of who and what we are.

To be connected is better that to be separated however, for some, being faced with the idea of being connected to everything feels overwhelming and too much, perhaps because of some sort of belief about the limits of their capacity to love or attend to the world and a desire to keep the horizon of their attention to a manageable and controllable sphere. At the heart of this self determined limiting thinking is a fear of some sort.

So we select who or what we connect to; partly consciously partly unconsciously, in response to such fear, as a coping strategy. And so does everyone else, meaning we live in a world that validates and reinforces this choice to fear what we don’t know, what we are not in relationship with.

In our disconnected world, things happen and we don’t know they are a result of our disconnection; war, violence, abuse, neglect, environmental crises, holocaust, drug and other forms of self abuse, pornography, the seeking of power, etc all become possible when we imagine ourselves as separate and therefore seek to win at other’s cost.

We have become so surrounded by the consequences of a disconnected world, we can’t even see it being disconnected any more. Things happen like Benazir Bhutto being assassinated, or China being the largest and fastest growing non-democratic abuse of power and resources in the world, (second only to America which appears to be the same except with a semblance of democracy) and we don’t seem to notice, or we don’t act like we notice. Or perhaps we don’t know how to act? We seem to wait of someone else to take charge, to sort things out. We look to our governments, to the UN, to Bono, to Bill Gates to sort it all out in the manner of fixing a problem, like on a car.

We have forgotten that how we think about ourselves makes things worse.

Perhaps a greater awareness of how things are actually linked (in a scientific way) might foster a remembering of our “collective oneness” that we otherwise forget?

Perhaps if were to ask ourselves which relationships get neglected and why, it might help us notice which relationships we privilege and ask ourselves why?

How does power/money/status become a proxy for relationship?

Perhaps if we able to become fully present, physically emotionally and spiritually, and look towards what is most dear to us, what we care about most, we might remember to love one another and our environment – that which is the same as us - instead of being so scared?

The mental construction of our selves as separate is a choice, what Batson would call an epistemology. Writers as diverse as Buber, Bateson, Berman and Bowlby have all suggested that a collective, connected, relational way of thinking about ourselves might be compared with the prevailing individualistic and separated form of identity. So it becomes interesting to reflect on this question of how we know about ourselves and the processes of socially constructed reality which underlie the formation of these collective beliefs, especially together.

West wind by Mary Oliver

You are young, so you know everything.
You leap into the boat and begin rowing.
But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without
embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk
directly to your soul. Lift the oars from the
water, let your arms rest, and let your heart,
and heart's little intelligence, and listen to me.
There is life without love. Its not worth the
body of a dead dog nine days unburied.
When you hear, a mile away, and still out of
sight, the churn of the water as it begins to
swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp
rocks - when you hear that unmistakeable
pounding - when you feel the mist on your
mouth and sense ahead the embattlement,
the long falls plunging and streaming - then
row, row for your life toward it.

Mainstream business writers are talking about the quality of working relationships

Two recent books, one published by Wharton Business School called
"Firms of Endearment", written by Sisodia, Wolfe and Sheath (2007)
talks about the importance of a firms stakeholders and how well people
in a firm attend to and build relationships with all the stakeholders
who contribute to success.

http://www.firmsofendearment.com/

The other, written by Robert Sutton, professor of management science
and engineering at Stanford University, called "The No Asshole Rule:
Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't", (New
York: Warner Business Books, 2007), is the subject of a McKinsey
Quarterly article here:

http://www.successfactors.com/docs/McKinseyQuarterly-Q107.pdf

The focus on this book is on the quality of internal working
relationships and what happens if an organisation does nothing in
response to people who behave like "jerks" to one another. It leads
with a piece on SuccessFactors, one of the fastest growing firms in
the world, which requires new employees to sign up to rules of
engagement which include, at number 14: "I will be a good person to
work with - I will not be a jerk"

http://www.successfactors.com/company/rules/

What are your thoughts? Is this a passing interest or likely to
indicate real curiosity in the nature of relationships at work?

Researching love

Harry Harlow was a psychologist working in the fifties who became somewhat famous for his experiments with monkeys. He was trying to discover something about intelligence and started with conventional tests like puzzles to see how the monkeys behaved. During the process, however, he became fascinated in the animal's social interaction and gradually shifted his attention to other things, including a series of experiments on the impact of different forms of care on the development of personality in baby monkeys.

Bear in mind that, at the time, conventional wisdom and psychologists were agreed that children should be protected from harmful infectious contact with people. Mothers were discouraged to touch their new born infants, children in hospitals lay in isolation, sometimes only touched through a screen and if children had to be taken into care, they remained isolated for many years. Sadly, one of the consequences of this approach was that, while the rates of infection went down, the rates of mortality stayed stubbornly high.

What did he find? “Love, Harry would eventually argue, was not built on one relationship but many. Our love lives, all of them, forge links in a healthy chain of normal development: maternal love, infant love, paternal love, friendship, partnership – one connecting to the next and then the next. The early attachment is the first link of that chain, the start of our ability to connect with others.” Pg 194

“In a social species, Harry said, one relationship is never enough. We build a world of connections. We weave them – contacts and friendships and family and loves – into something that we lightly call “a support network” and which is really the safety net that catches us as we balance our way along the high wire act of everyday life and from which all of us occasionally fall”.

“In the end, Harry Harlow’s vision of the nature of love was a sweeping one…. [He believed that] love matters, that social connection counts, that we are defined as individuals, in part, by our place in the community”. Pg 263

What's your community like? How are you, as a person, supported by the community in which you work?





Source: Blum, D. (2002), Love at Goon Park, Perseus, ISBN 0-7382-0278-9

On expressing our feelings...

Putting emotions into words can sometimes feel inadequate I find. I wonder what you do to communicate how you feel about people? The idea of talking about the nature of relationships at work might feel even more strange, and yet I'm sure some people express their feelings about others in their working environment in a normal and easy way....

What's your experience?

I find poems seem to capture feelings very well and while I know David Whyte has published many poems about working life, I don't find his work speaks to me emotionally in the same way as people like Mary Oliver or William Stafford.

from the William Stafford archive:

Some aphorisms from William Stafford's daily writings of the 1950s and 60s

Off a high place, it is courtesy to let others go first.

It is legitimate to crawl, after the wings are broken.

I follow a trail so old the hounds lost it years ago.

Actors, their relief. I have to be myself with no vacation.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy -- no distractions.

The grace we need to find will not be found by the graceful only.

Prisoners in the barracks camp, we learned why Indians carry blankets -- a home.

It still takes all kinds to make a world, but there's an oversupply of some.

Successful people are in a rut.

Every mink has a mink coat.

Aggressive people do not appeal to me; I yield them scorched earth.

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

What's love got to do with it?

What has love got to do with organisational life? Is it relevant? Roger Harrison, a well respected organisation development consultant, wrote a paper in 1997 called "A time for letting go". In it he said “I have sadly come to think of [people working in organisations] as addicts, struggling with increasing desperation to control their lives and to feed their addictions with growth, money, novelty, success. Like most addicts, they lie, cheat and steal to support their addictions; they live in denial of the consequences of their actions; and they turn ugly when confronted with their addictions.” Have you seen this happen? What's your view?

Love is a tricky word….

This post is the first in a series based on my doctorate proposal paper submitted last December and now reviewed by my supervisors and peers. There will be more to follow.

When talking about this research, I notice that the word love is something people see as being hard to talk about in organisations. I guess because it brings with it many meanings and evokes reactions that are complex. I notice that when I’ve started talking to people about this topic, they often spontaneously offer alternative words like compassion, as though love is too difficult to imagine being used in a business context. "Do you think you will be able to do an inquiry about love?" they ask. "Who do you think will be interested or willing to do that?" seems to be the question behind the question.

So, as I begin to think about this topic and how to describe the inquiry, one of the questions I am thinking about is the importance and impact of the words we use. My first reaction, like some of those people who I spoke to about the topic was to assume that words like love would be too hard to use in organisations (by which I really mean too soft and therefore too difficult). I began to wonder whether I might need to use alternatives like healthy, responsibility or sustainability?

And then, as the conversation unfolds it becomes interesting to see how much energy the word love seems to bring to people, as though the word releases something that's pent up and waiting to find expression, an energy with an emotive aspect to it. People get engaged in the conversation, they lean forwards and start becoming a little more available somehow.

So, what language makes sense to you? What would be a way to start to talk about this with others and avoid creating distance?