The One to One

Each semester, I meet with every student in my class for an hour per student. It's about 30 extra hours outside of teaching the class and (much like the singing exercise) I ask myself if I really have it in myself to keep doing it each semester. The one-to-one is a time when I ask students questions about who they really are, what drives them, what makes them come alive, and where their true purpose lies. It is also a time when I tell them what I have been thinking about the semester: my general observations and questions I have about their choices or non-choices as the case may be. I have gotten a reputation among the students for having the courage to say things that others do not say to them, but sometimes I forget the basic rule of invitation.

Peter Block in his book, "Community: The Structure of Belonging" (2009) states that "Invitation is the means through which hospitality is created. Invitation counters the conventional belief that change requires mandate or persuasion.  Invitation honors the the importance of choice, the necessary condition for accountability" (p.113).   When I forget to invite students into the one to one in a way that asks for their permission to share my thoughts and to ask them hard questions, I have not honored the importance of choice.

When I attended the Powers of Leadership Training created by Sharon Parks and Larry Daloz at the Whidbey Institute (http://www.whidbeyinstitute.org/conversation/id/dbd7b8/about), I learned about a way to invite students into these hard conversations that is both simple and effective.  When I sit down to do a one-to-one with a student, I ask "At what level would you like my feedback -- extremely gentle,  moderately gentle but with pushes here and there, or no holding back?"  Extremely gentle doesn't mean lying.  It means telling them things that are absolutely true, but in ways that put my relationship with the student first and the feedback second.  No holding back doesn't mean verbally being harsh, it means I dig deeper into their default first responses and I use gentle, but powerful phrases as "I wonder what life would be like if you let go of that thought?"

The one to one is an art and has taken a while to learn to do effectively, but it makes life in the case-in-point classroom so much more effective.  Through genuine invitation, challenge, and support my students and I learn to lean in to the discomfort of naming things publicly, questioning assumptions, and   building public powerful relationships that can effect change. 

Fear Mongering is Not Leadership: How to Handle Fear Mongering in the Moment

Doubting and questioning systems and/or authority are all integral parts of leadership and healthy discourse for a democratic society.  Fear mongering, on the other hand, has no place in healthy leadership.  The fear mongering that is being mistaken for leadership in the media, in the board room, the classroom, and even in conversations among friends is manipulation disguised as leadership.  The insidious nature of fear mongering is that it triggers its audience at a biological level to bypass reason, common sense, and one's own truth. 

The objective of fear mongering is not truth, but control.  It's outward message is usually some variation on the same theme: Don't do X because bad things will happen, They shouldn't do X because bad things will happen, You're/they're doing X hurts others. And because so many of us doubt our power and truth, these overarching, unexamined exaggerations trigger the shame, doubt, and fear that live within us.  When unexamined shame steps in, we generally keep our eyes and heads down or worse, we become agents of the fear mongering and work to shut others down.

Lately, there have been several strategic fear mongering campaigns against higher education.  People have written editorials and articles that have pulled half truths and raised them up as fact the way the leaders of a mob in medieval times raised superstitious symbols above their heads and cried "Witch!"  I don't know how the general public reacted to these calls to fear toward higher education, but I know some of my comrades and colleagues responded with their own fear.  "Keep your head down. Stop doing innovative work. Don't do what you know to be right because it could be seen, misconstrued, and published in the paper." The really interesting thing about this case of fear mongering (the fear that higher education is misspending money) is that  it went from a shot in the dark to running the daily decisions of people engaging in research to ending poverty, cancer, sex trafficking, etc.-- people who are experts in what they do and how they do it.  In this way fear mongering is like an opportunist thief.  It goes for the easy targets and will continue on to the next and the next, not preferring one target over another as long as it is easy. 

Fear mongering is ancient.  It will conceivably be around as long as the world is.  But let's be clear: Fear mongering is not leadership, it is merely an invitation for leadership. People often use it when they have slipped into fear/shame themselves and don't want others to notice.  For example, a fear monger-er points fingers, whereas a leader does the harder (and more risky work of)  proffering solutions.  A fear monger-er may then poke holes in the proffered solution while still having put nothing on the line of himself other than more fear mongering.  How would a leader respond to such continued fear mongering? By naming the strategy being used, and pushing back with questions that lead to clearing thinking and more innovation. 

If you are reading this blog, then you have the power to end fear mongering in your corner of the world.  Contrary to popular mythology, leadership does not start with an epic moment.  Leadership starts with tiny moments -- it happens one courageous conversation at a time. 

How to Change Fear Mongering

1. Be on the look out for it.  The first battle is to notice when it's being used.  This lowers your chances of being triggered by it and allowing it to move you into a place of fear or shame yourself. 

2. Engage the person who has become a vehicle for fear mongering in a healing conversation.  Be sure that your first objective in the conversation is to seek to understand how they ended up being the vehicle in the first place.  Be genuinely curious and use reflective listening ("It sounds like this issue/article/piece of information has caused some concern for you."  "I wonder where they go their information?" "I wonder if there are other perspectives or conclusions?") 

3.  Question your thoughts.  Fear mongering is powerful only when it remains unexamined.  If you have a colleague/friend who can help you examine the thoughts and feelings someone's fear mongering has triggered in you, do that.  If you can't, it on paper.  (See Byron Katie's work "Loving What Is" for four questions that will help you do this on your own: http://thework.com/thework.php)


The world needs people who can not only hold steady during these hinge times but who can help those who have succumbed to the fear that abounds to find their way through.  Let that person be you.

When Teaching, it Pays to Think Like a Novel Writer

Let’s face it, we enjoy learning from people who are funny, engaging, celebrate our failures, and who build an experience that unfolds like a story.  Thinking like a novel writer supports effective learning by engaging the needs of students’ psychologies throughout the semester. It forces the instructor to facilitate related experiences that build one another. It also allows the instructor to slowly and responsibly build to a higher level of intensity necessary for transformative learning.  Much like a novel writer needs to bring the reader along, so an instructor needs to lay the foundation before jumping into the climax. Although it’s a horrific image, we have long used the metaphor of boiling frogs within our program to help new instructors understand this idea.  In the late 1990’s a story circulated via email that if you threw a frog into a fully boiling pot of water, it would jump out to save its life; however, if you put it into cool water and turned up the heat slowly, it would allow itself to be boiled alive.  This may not be true for frogs, but it serves as a powerful reminder for us to think like a novel writer. In Parks’ and Heifetz’s language (Leadership Can Be Taught, 1995) this would be akin to turning the heat up slowly so that students can tolerate the tension enough to benefit from it.  

Another purpose of thinking like a novel writer is that much like a good novel, a good class draws our attention in a way that keeps us up at night thinking about it; our identity gets wrapped up in it and it haunts us as we think about things we have not before. As Sir Ken Robinson so aptly points out, “An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you’re resonating with excitement at this thing that you’re experiencing, when you are fully alive.  An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what is happening,” (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html). 

Creating exciting, aesthetic experiences opens students to learning in ways that cannot occur in ordinary classrooms. Isn't that what we are all looking for? Moments of wonder, surprise, and mystery? Why should the classroom be any different?

The Role of Intention in Case-In-Point Teaching

In my experience of life, there is only one thing that I have absolute control over.  It’s not my actions, my thoughts, or my feelings.  I believe the only thing that I have absolute control over are my intentions.  I can point to several specific instances in my life where I have tried to control my behavior, thoughts, or feelings, but have failed miserably and sometimes with significant consequences.  On the other hand, I cannot think of a single time when I did not have absolute control over my intention in any given situation.  However, having control over something doesn’t mean I remember to use that control.  Neither does it mean that it didn’t take considerable practice and intention in itself to learn to be present to that control.

Intention is not vision, it’s not deep purpose, it’s not control, and it’s not a boundary, but it is interdependent with all of those aspects of life. To me, intention is the power I have in steering the co-creation of the reality I am sharing with others (it’s the “co” in co-creation).  Intention is an opening to possibilities I would not have seen without crystallizing my thoughts around what it is I want to see.  Intention is what turns a blob of clay into a work of art, but not in isolation from the clay itself, the deeper purpose of the potter’s life or the intended deep purpose of what is created from that space.  If intention is the one thing, the one and only thing, I have total and absolute control over, then it has to be powerful.  It must be the kind of power that is powerful even when I am not consciously directing it. When I am not intentional, I am still co-creating reality, I am still putting my hands on the clay, I’m just doing it with some other intention, without a destination, without taking responsibility for being the potter.  That doesn’t mean I control the wheel or the behavior of clay itself – but I would bet that it influences all those factors.  When I have a crystal clear intention, I am creating a boundary and eliminating some of the possibilities that were there within the clay before I started working with it.  

When I teach and I am crystal clear about my intentions, the same thing happens – I am eliminating some of the millions of possibilities that could take place within the classroom.  In case-in-point teaching, intention is paramount because I have to trust that in planning for class, although I will have to surrender some of what I meticulously planned to the emergent context, it forces me to set the deep purpose of each class meeting.  It’s as if what I pay attention to, how I respond, what I see and hear, how I interpret events, and even how I feel is completely overlaid with that intention.  I see within that framework.  I respond to the emergent context within that framework.  I teach to that intention and I achieve results within that specific intention.  On the days when I am not intentional, but allowing an intention that is not conscious to me to drive my work, I am certain that I achieve the results of that unconscious intention, but it is usually neither pleasant nor not powerful in the end.  

I like to bring this up to my students in juxtaposition to Ivan Illich’s “To Hell with Good Intentions,” which I firmly believe in—just as I believe in the well-worn adage, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  When I am really honest about my intentions, they move beyond “good intentions.”  They become alive and specific.  They become powerful and conscious.  And in many cases, they become transparent to others which helps with the co-creation of our shared reality because people can opt-in to that intention, help shape it, or opt-out and in doing so, their own intentions become conscious and open to their own exploration as well.

I think this is why creating or teaching a new class is so difficult for me.  I do not have a crystallized intention about the class. I want to keep many options open and I often have far more readings, assignments, and themes for the semester than anyone can handle (especially me).  After the first iteration of failure, some of the distracting course components fall away and the intentions for the course become more clear.  The second semester becomes even more clear and by the third semester, my intentions for the entire course and each class period have gotten so clear that I am able to finally teach the course I could barely even envision when sitting at a blank syllabus template three semesters beforehand.  

When there are no words

There are moments in teaching adaptive leadership that take me so by surprise in their elegance and beauty that there are no words. I have been teaching the capstone class in our Leadership Minor this semester,which means that I have the absolute honor of being able to work with the students who committed four years of their lives to our program. This semester, we tried something new. Their final project for the Minor was their choice. They got to decide how to leave a legacy in their own way, on their own terms, and in their own authentic voices. The projects were revealed by the students this week and what they allowed to be brought into this world through their humility, integrity, intention, and power was so wholly authentic that I could not speak. I could only sit in silence with them for several moments and join the weeping faces of acknowledgement that what they did was sacred. They have documented some of this journey at their own blog site: whatmakesyoulegit.blogger.com; however, what isn't captured there is the essence of who they have become. These are the people I want to work with, these are the people I want saving my life when I enter an emergency room, evaluating securities and trading companies, administering my medicine when I am in a nursing home, teaching my children to read and think, running my country, flying my plane, inventing the solutions, finding the cures, opening a door for me when my hands are full. These are the people who are holding the world in their hands along with us and I am glad to call them colleagues.

To teach with intention and to be present to what emerges within that context, to know that I am nothing and everything to the group around me, and to deeply connect with the unknowable in order to allow it to bring us all to a higher level of understanding is beyond words, but is clearly a gift from everyone involved. I thank my students for holding that intention with me this semester and co-creating the learning that we all took part in.

The Singing Exercise

Today's class was about facing the fears (and the excuses for these fears) which hold us back from being authentic/vulnerable and owing our power as leaders. (It is based on a chapter from Leadership Can Be Taught by Sharon Parks.) Holding this class is exhausting. Holding this class IS the signing exercise for the instructor. I introduced the basic gist of the class the week before (by modeling the exercise for them) and the class then spent an entire week sending flaming e-mails amongst themselves about how unfair this exercise was, how it was really a chance for them to be embarrassed, and how it had nothing to do with leadership. However, by the end of class today, I can safely say that they addressed these grievances themselves. Every semester, I ask myself if I should go through with this again and every time the answer from those who have gone before a resounding "YES!"

Three Marriages

I was speaking with my mentor last week and she asked me, "Where are the stresses in your life right now?" The answer was simple: work-life balance. She told me that when I phrase it that way, it means I am never fully immersed in one or the other, but always pulling back in an effort to maintain balance--which is an act of trying to off-set the movement of something by adding an opposite force. She said, "No wonder you are tired. Balancing on a knife point takes constant adjusting to the other side." Instead, she encouraged me to read David Whyte's new book called "Three Marriages" because it helps the reader understand that work, family, and self are not a balancing act, but relationships that all feed each other. I haven't read the book yet, but I plan to because I know that balancing these aspects of my life is not working and the first one of the three I "cheat on" is myself. By cheating myself, the other two relationships don't have a chance to thrive because, after all, didn't they choose me and what good is the "me" they chose if I can't even be present in the marriages?

One might ask what this has to do with adaptive leadership and you'd be right in questionning that. I will tell you that, for me, it has everything to do with it. Adaptive Leadership is about letting go of silos and integrating stakeholders. I am the biggest stakeholder of my life and I can't pretend that these three "marriages" of self, family, and work don't affect each other. I can't live a siloed life anymore. I don't believe that anyone is actually capable of separating these aspects of life, even though we think we do on a daily basis. All I have to do is look around at my students to know this is true. For example, today alone in class, a student is recovering from the loss of her cousin by suicide a week ago, another from the death of his dad just a month ago and a bicycling accident on Saturday that has temporarily disfigured his face, another who is so depressed he struggles to get out of bed each day, another who is single-parenting an 18 month old. They are 19 years old, they show up to class each day and they want to silo their lives, but I will not allow a class culture that supports such a thing. So, they bring their lives to the class and that becomes part of the fabric of the class. And, they take the class back to their lives and they change their friends, their careers, and their habits. And the carrier of all of this? The medium of change that makes this all possible? The Self. The marriage to the self (with a small s) that eventually becomes the marriage to the Self (with a big S, the non-egoic part that is actually unselfish by nature) after much attention has been paid to it. The rest just springs forth from that one fearless committment to be fully who we were born to be, an integrated and whole person acting from a place of integrated wisdom instead of siloed fears.