What is it to learn?

When we lead, innovate, or propose new behaviors and actions with others we are on the path of learning.  The automatic response from people in our culture to new action is to take on “doing,” doing what they already know.  We live with the common approach that we get a theory or concept, and then we “apply” it.  And actions of this type imply that we do not fundamentally change in ourselves, we don’t learn in any meaningful way, we just “do” something differently with the skill set we already have.

However, success in any of these endeavors at a non-trivial level cannot happen without deeper learning.  We cannot learn courage by doing something we already know. We cannot learn love, or listening, or connection doing what we already know.  We cannot learn leadership, or coaching, or healing by doing what we already know.  We must enter the unknown. We must engage in new experiences.

Our predominant mode of learning is intellectual, conceptual or academic learning.  We have been taught to “understand,” and that we know when we understand.  We know when we can pass a test that shows understanding. We have devolved knowing into understanding, although understanding the instructions of the tennis coach does not in itself produce the capacity to execute better tennis.  The body must learn, not just the intellect. So it is with leading, being a professional, and with life.  We must learn fully in the body.

In learning in the body we shift what we pay attention to – we see differently, we make different distinctions.  Through practice doctors see different bodies than non-doctors, an architect sees a different building than that one a non-architect looks at. And we can also learn new actions.  Learning the science of health is not to learn the practice of medicine, and learning the theory of architecture does not enable you to design buildings without the practice and experience of designing buildings.

Learning in the body happens through practice, through the recurrence of facing and shifting our own embodiment, facing variations of situations, and learning to generate an outcome through embodied action.  Studies have shown that physical actions – and these include conversations, emotions, and presence – requires on the order of three thousand repetitions to produce transparent embodiment, a habit or skill.  And what is crucial to understand is that our bodies are always practicing.  It’s not an option to practice or not.  The only option is to choose what we are practicing.  And this requires new skills for most of us, new practices of awareness and attention, new practices of practicing.

Studies of high performance and mastery have revealed that masters practice in a particular way – they engage in “deliberate practice. [i]” This is a practice of learning – of staying on the edge, and slightly beyond it, of their current competence. Masters are always entering into what they don’t know and are not yet skillful at.

We have found that to embody new skills we cannot leave out emotions. The work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows that emotions – rather than being a separate compartment from reason that must be kept fully shut for rational behavior – are in fact part of the process of “rational” thinking and choosing.  We cannot be rational or intelligent in the world without full engagement with our emotional faculties.  The coach Julio Olalla shows that emotions are a “predisposition to action,” and open and close the possible outcomes for our actions.  We cannot produce excellence in performance from resentment or resignation.

And so we see that learning, the path to new actions, new outcomes, and new possibilities for the future, the world, and what we are about, must include our bodies and emotions in addition to our conceptual understanding. But with all these present, this may not be the whole story.

There is also another way to learn – to learn with heart.  But this “heart” we are referring to is not just the physical organ, nor is it just our emotional being.  Heart is a place in the body where we experience our connection with life, where purpose and meaning surge through us as felt experiences, not just opinions.  We know this in western culture when we say “I don’t have the heart for it,” or “my heart is really in it,” or an experience is “heartfelt.”  In this use of the word “heart,” we are referring more to the core of our being than its emotional side effect. In Chinese medicine, the heart is the coordinator of the body, hence our own embodied leader, and the place where action initiates and meaning arises.

In Chinese wisdom there is the term “gan dong,” which has been translated as “the transmission of knowledge that takes place only when the heart is moved.”  This is a way of learning in which understanding concepts is not adequate, and even embodied learning through recurrence may not be sufficient.

Thea Elijah, a teacher of Medicine Without Form, writes “Unfortunately for most of us, Gan Dong (the transmission of knowledge that takes place only when the heart is moved) was not a significant aspect of our early educational experience.  In and out of school, we were usually asked to accept ideas, concepts, theories and “data” as reality, often without any experiential component to the transmission.”  This kind of learning requires a particular aspect of our embodiment to be brought to engagement, and engaged in particular ways.

Learning with heart is not only a way of learning, but is also an important purpose for learning.  In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, he introduces the shaman don Juan, who says that the only path worth walking in life is “the path with heart.”  And in the end, learning is for the sake of life and living, living a good life for ourselves and others, creating a future in which we take care of what we care about.

As leaders we can guide, coach, and lead only when we are on the path of learning ourselves. I invite us to the path of life-time learning including and beyond understanding, walking the path of aliveness in the wholeness of our bodies, emotions, and heart.

By Bob Dunham

In the common sense of our culture a leader is one who has power, who gathers power, and who exercises it in a way that affects the futures of others. In the Institute for Generative Leadership we see this interpretation as inadequate to understand leadership well or to grow leadership capability to build a future we want to participate in.  Although leadership certainly includes the generation and use of power, we also claim that leadership must include care, care as the point for which power is used.

Our interpretation of leadership includes answering the question “For the sake of what?” do we wish to shape the future, to desire or wield power.  We can distinguish uses of power that have positive, and negative, effects on those who are affected by it.  Those who seek power only for the sake of power itself, power for only their own personal concerns, or power against whole communities eventually produce negative futures for others.  This happens because these kinds of leaders do not include the concerns of others in their view of the future and the power to realize it.  Some may try to produce the appearance of concern for others, but in the end they cannot hide their raw greed for power.  Negative leaders run the gamut from Hitler and Stalin, who built visions of a future that included the destruction of whole communities, to demagogues who create power through division and hate, and to those who pursue power for their own greed or will to power.

What we consider a positive form of leadership is one which is committed to a more positive future for all who are affected by it, including working through the tradeoffs and challenges that designing and producing such a future requires.  By positive we mean that people are better able to take care of their concerns, such as for a culture of freedom or social justice, for a more prosperous and healthy community, for a successful business, or for providing services and aid to members of the community in need.

Our interpretation of leadership, which we call generative leadership, is one that is founded in human existence, in the human power to shape the future – a future that has meaning and value for a community.  Leaders have certain concerns and take certain actions that distinguish them as leaders.  These concerns and actions are constitutive of leadership, since they constitute, or create leadership.  They are also regularities of leadership we can recognize.  Our interpretation of the constitutive regularities of leadership is that:

• Leaders take care.
• Leaders build power for themselves and others.
• Leaders make offers.
  • Leaders speak and move with a presence, a voice, and identity to have their offers heard and accepted.
  • Leaders build new narratives of and commitments for the future with others.

Leaders take Care

Our first answer to the question of “What is a leader?” is that a leader is someone who takes care of concerns, and builds the capabilities of others to take care of their concerns.  These concerns can be distinguished from the perspective that life in our current era is lived in distinctions of:

• Self
• Others

We can interpret our concerns in these two dimensions: 1) the concerns we have as individuals, as Selves, and 2) the concerns that we have for and with Others – the dimension of relationship.  These concerns are related, since our concerns for others are part of what shapes the Self that we are, and our concerns as a Self orient us to how we will relate to others.  But these concerns can also be differentiated.

Those concerns that arise due to the fact that we exist as a Self are those concerns that life brings us, the constitutive concerns of being human, such as taking care of our bodies, families, need for money to live, membership and community, play, work, career, and so on.  We all want the power to be able to take the actions to take care of these concerns.  We call these the concerns of the Self, and these are domains of action that we cannot avoid. If we don’t take care with our actions in these domains, we will have breakdowns.  We claim that living a good life is taking care of these concerns.

Some of these concerns belong to our relationships with others.  It is in our social relationships that we generate whatever power we have to lead, to be heard, or to shift the future.  We live in networks with others, and in communities where we couple and contribute to each other in our social practices.  In these social practices, we are granted power based on the value we create for others, for the value of our commercial offers, for the value of the love we give, for our taking care of what others care about.  In this way we move with social concerns, those concerns we share with others, our concerns for how our actions affect others, how others react to our actions, and the affect this has on us.  These concerns may also be ones that constitute our Self – who we say we are – but because they are fundamentally social, they can only be taken care of in our social interactions.

Our social concerns arise from the fact that we couple with others in our mutual interdependencies in life together.  In our culture important social concerns are work and careers as we interact with others to make money, and to build our professional paths.  In our current culture, the focus on producing value with our professional work often gets disconnected from what we care about, separating us from the concerns of our Self.

Strong and effective leaders bring passion to their leadership. This passion adds to their presence, power, and effectiveness.  We will base leadership on an authentic offer to take care of the concerns we share with others and have passion to address.

Leaders build power

We live in a world with others, and this is how power arises.  Our interpretation of power is that it is an assessment of a differential of capacity for effective action in some domain, which leads to making choices of who you trust for certain actions, and who trusts you.  Power thus shapes our relationships.

Getting power always comes from an act of being authorized by others.  In our families and communities, the power we have to take care of our concerns is granted to us by others in many ways:  by the money people pay us for the value of our actions; by the love of our families; by the care of our friends; by the trust we have from our public identities as professionals, community members, contributors, or experts in some domain of concern.  So it is in the domains of action that are social, that include others, that we generate our power and autonomy to take care, through the assessments that we produce in others.

It is in making offers to build the capabilities of others to take care of what they care about that we see the connection of taking care with building power.  Power is ultimately granted to us by others, and we are granted power by others when we have built power for them, addressing their ability to take care of what they care about.  In accumulating power, we build our capability as leaders to take care of what we care about and what others care about.

Leaders make offers

The fundamental social act that creates leadership is the offer.  It is an act of relationship, of creating a shared future with another.  In offering, leaders promise to produce a new future for others if they accept the offer and the commitments it requires.  Offers lead to an exchange of power, where the leader is granted power by others in return for the promise they make about the future.  It is in these exchanges that we not only shift the future with others, but also where we build our own identity and our own power.  Leaders initiate or promote these exchanges by making offers – offers that are commercial, offers to lead, offers that shift the future, offers of a new narrative of the future, and even the offer of possibilities that others see just from the way you move in your body and in the world.

Leaders build presence, voices, and identity in the world

In order for our offers to be heard, we have to have the identity and presence that produces enough trust in others for them to accept our offers, or at least be in conversation with us about the possibilities we represent for their future.  A key concern for our leadership is to become observers and actors of our presence, of our voice, and of the identity we have and are building in the world.

Leaders build new narratives of and commitments for the future

Whether it be building a new shop that attracts customers, taking a leading role in a community organization, running for political office, producing a new product or business, or producing a new vision of the future that shifts how people think, leaders build new narratives that others see their future in, and within which they make new commitments.  This of course depends on the identity we build, the presence we have, our voice and the offers we make, and how we conduct ourselves in our social relations and in the fulfillment of our offers.  The extent and impact of our leadership can range from affecting your relationship and future with another, to shifting the practices of a whole community in a way that it is history making.

The concern for any enterprise is its level of performance, and for most members of the enterprise is a concern for how to elevate the level of performance.  This elevation can be to fulfill the ambition for growth, to meet a changing marketplace, to match competition, or even for the sake of survival or to stay even in its outcomes and prospects. But over time this elevation of performance requires change, learning, and a reconfiguration of processes, practices, and even the understanding of how to function. Every organization eventually faces these changes into today’s world.

The point is to create a winning game, and too often leaders fall into the assumption that winning is just a matter of working harder in the current game. Yet having to work harder is a symptom that the current game isn’t as valuable, productive, or effective as it used to be.  It’s the wake up call to examine the game you are playing, the game that is needed, the gaps between them, and strategies to close these gaps.

This view applies from cut-throat competition in global cell phone markets to small companies trying to make it.

What is often secondary or even left out of the strategy for change in organizations is the shift to be made by the people, the shift in skills, roles, understanding, interpretation, attention, and practice. The shift is a journey that is sometimes addressed by “change management,” usually regarded as futile excursion into pain, a mandate for the often struggling management team, or a quick toss to a new CEO or executive savior. And if the change required is late and significant, larger companies are potential targets for corporate raiders or private equity slash-and-burn investors.

Starting with the human dimension as the source of power and focus for change for significant measurable results is an approach in used in our consulting company Enterprise Performance (EP) over the years, based on the discipline of generative leadership developed and offered by our sister company the Institute of Generative Leadership.  At the Institute we focus on the development of individual leaders and leadership teams in leadership skills. In Enterprise Performance we focus on the application of these skills to address real business and organizational breakdowns and opportunities for measurable results.

As an example Enterprise Performance was engaged to work with a software development group in one of the largest software product manufacturers in the world. (The EP approach is based on human coordination, and is not just appropriate for software – we have worked with semiconductor, medical, mortgage industry, technology, service, and other companies. At the time the group had seventy software engineers, and the group was having significant trouble delivering to and satisfying the six product groups that they were producing software for. Late and buggy software deliveries were producing delays in product releases, with tens of millions of dollars of revenue lost or deferred as a consequence.  The team was also in overload and burnout while failing to meet its commitments or produce satisfactory software on time. Our approach enabled the following positive shifts in the operating performance of this team:

Before Enterprise Performance Tune Up                                  After – 4 months later

As is explained in the discussion that follows, this shift was made by introducing the CTT management to the principles, and more importantly the practices, of managing commitments, capacity, managing customer satisfaction, coordinating work, and implementing their day to day management practices around this approach.  The client team made this approach such a success because they were committed learners, were motivated by considerable pain, and found that the new actions addressed the issues they were facing.

The Enterprise Performance approach addresses the key issues of “what to do,” “how to do it,” “how to learn to do it,” and “how to implement what I am learning in my world” in establishing more effective result-oriented perspectives and actions in a team.  The approach allows customization for a specific client and client situation from a rich discipline of management practices that have been developed, refined, and deployed in dozens of companies over the last twenty years and taught to hundreds of managers and executives.  The approach centers on the frameworks, skills, and practices to: make commitments that you can fulfill, and avoid overcommitting; manage your commitments to produce customer satisfaction in the fulfillment of the commitments and during the performance to fulfill; stay in communication with customers throughout the project to maintain trust, satisfaction, and open future opportunities with the customers; coordinate the making and fulfillment of commitments with the entire team that is responsible for fulfillment, so there is ownership and teamwork; make the progress and problems of work and projects visible so that they can be better managed, and customer expectations be taken care of; and establish clear accountabilities and communication practices  at the individual, as well as team, level.

Here’s some examples of key skills that the team had to develop in this project:

• Saying “no” when performance was infeasible, and address the situation rather than cover it up with an uncommitted “yes”.
• Clarifying the actual capacity of the team, and not allowing demands to exceed capacity at unsustainable levels.
• Negotiating and documenting clear commitments with the team’s customers.
• Clarifying roles, particularly around who managed the relationship with the customers, and how the team coordinated with the relationship          managers.
• Establishing visibility as to the progress with key commitments.
• Establishing regular communication with the customer where progress was reported, problems anticipated, and issues resolved together.
• Clear coordination practices for the team members.

The shift was a shift the skills, behaviors, and practices of the client team.  Through working sessions, clear actions and practices, and the support and feedback of skillful EP coaches the client team was able to change, adopt, and embody new skills in a matter of months. All of these practices were based on foundations of skills in action-communication and the making and managing of commitments, by all the team members.

What this project demonstrates is the importance of shifting the skills, behaviors, and practices of organizational staffs and their managers in order to shift the performance of the enterprise. The people are worked with as the responsible source of action, commitment, and outcomes, not as resistant components plugged into a new system.  The system, processes, and tools then follow. The EP approach is founded in what only the people can deliver in the organization – commitment, ownership, accountability, care and commitment.  When these are mobilized in clear and effective practices for coordinating action, they affect the performance of the enterprise directly.

The reason we have interest in Next Generation Leadership is because the last generation of leadership interpretations were inadequate.  They didn’t deliver the goods of enabling actual leadership and leadership results, however captivating the leadership framework and stories.

Leadership is a field that needs some clarity and usefulness where we outgrow our appetite for “next generation leadership” because the last generation didn’t produce satisfaction and effectiveness.  We need an understanding of leadership that is fundamental, clear, observable, necessary, executable, rigorous, and learnable.  We need an interpretation that brings us closer to the “eternally valid aspects” of leadership, regardless of culture or historical era.

Leadership, as with any other field of human endeavor, is a field of distinctions, practice, and discourse.  As a discourse, leadership shows up for us based on what story and distinctions we have for it, and these  shape and enable the actions we take as leaders.  Our personal discourse of leadership may be rich and enabling, or sparse and remote. For many people “leadership” is just a word that names something that is not clear, a bit mysterious, but seems important.  They lack the distinctions to see, learn, or carry out effective leadership, though they do experience occasional moments where it seems to happen anyway.

Leadership draws tremendous attention with many books, programs, and approaches, as we try to explain, show, inspire, and enable effective leadership.  The wide diversity of interpretations and approaches is also a symptom that we don’t have a clear shared interpretation of what it is.  We don’t have, for example, such a wide diversity of interpretations for basic chemistry – it’s pretty settled as a field of understanding, interpretation, and practice.  We still lack such a foundational understanding of leadership.  The diversity of approaches to understanding leadership is reflected in a wide diversity of business leadership programs, business management courses, executive leadership programs, and offers of leadership coaching.

“Generative leadership” is the name of the field that has been focused on developing just such a fundamental set of leadership interpretations and practices, to find identifiable fundamental structures and regularities of the ways that effective leaders observe, act, and generate results.  We don’t believe that generative leadership is the only, final, or right interpretation of leadership, but rather that it provides a fundamental and permanent dimension of leadership interpretation that addresses what is missing in the mainstream common sense.  It provides a focus on what is fundamental and non-discretionary about leadership and also provides a frame which allows for variations in style, culture, situation, and historical moment. It acts as a foundation and cross check on other interpretations to increase the value they can provide by addressing the generative aspects of: what is observable, executable, learnable, and produces leadership outcomes.

The roots of generative leadership extend back into a discipline called ontological design, developed by Dr. Fernando Flores, and it is related to the field of ontological coaching, developed by Julio Olalla.   The discipline draws from many other fields including neuroscience, linguistics, somatics and embodiment, cognition, biology, psychology and emotions.  Developed by Bob Dunham since 1981, generative leadership comes from the original questions of “what is action?”, and “how do human beings produce action and coordinate action?”  These questions are so fundamental that they also provide powerful new answers to other questions including “what is leadership,” “what is management,” “what is a team,” and “what is an organization.”

These generative answers – which mean ones that are observable, executable, learnable, and that produce the outcome that is named – are based on focusing attention and action on phenomena that are not part of our mainstream awareness.  These include commitment based management and coordination, the power of conversations to generate action and results, the role of care in producing passion and ownership, and practice based learning.  Some of the key areas of focus of these interpretations include the role of emotions, body, and language in generating action, the role of care in value and satisfaction, and the essential aspects of coordination that underlie effective team performance.

In generative leadership acts of commitment, like requests and promises, produce the generative power of language and conversation.  All action is understood to be preceded by conversations that shape and determine its outcomes, both through performance and coordination, and through the assessments of the outcomes.  All conversations produce some kind of commitment that shapes future action, and the impact of every conversation is based on the coherence of its language, emotional tone, presence and body language. What people listen when others speak is based on their history and background. Leaders know how to connect to the historical listening and the care of others, and to provoke commitment for future actions.

The point about these distinctions is that they are all generative – observable, executable, learnable, and always are part of generating the results.  This is the power of the generative way of “observing.” This way of being an observer – of what one sees and pays attention to – enables being an actor that takes different kinds of action based on these fundamental aspects of human communication, coordination, leadership, management, and teamwork.

Although these distinctions are not yet part of our mainstream education and training, they address phenomena that are always present and in which we are always moving as human beings.  We are in a situation similar to medicine hundreds of years ago when doctors didn’t know or study anatomy, but anatomy was always there determining what was happening as a result of their actions.  Physicians became more effective when they became aware of and skillful with what was already there – anatomy, biochemistry, and the systems and dynamics of the body.  We believe that leadership and management face a similar historical moment: that practitioners are conscientious, hard-working, and dedicated, but are blind to the anatomy and dynamics of their domain of action, which is there all the time and determining their outcomes whether they pay attention to them or not.

To address this Bob Dunham founded the Institute for Generative Leadership in 1998 based on work that he and his colleagues have been involved in since 1981. The Institute has trained hundreds of executives, business owners, managers, and professionals through the Generative Leadership Program (GLP program). Bob’s experience includes being an executive in multiple companies, including as Vice President of Motorola Computer Systems, Vice President of Business Design Associates, and Chief Operating Officer of Action Technologies. He actively consults with client companies in management and leadership development.

He is also co-author of the book The Innovator’s Way, the Essential Practices for Successful Innovation with Dr. Peter Denning, published by MIT Press.  He designs and delivers multi-year programs in leadership in the US and South America, including the Generative Leadership Program (GLP).  He also delivers the Coaching Excellence in Organizations (CEO) program in a joint venture with Newfield Network, one of the leading schools of coaching in the world.  He is a guest lecturer in the Executive Certification Program for Presidio Graduate School and in the Leading by Design Fellows Program for the California College of the Arts, and was Adjunct Faculty, Executive in Residence, in the Presidio MBA program in Sustainable Management for three years. Bob has also been published with a chapter in the book Being Human at Work, edited by Dr. Richard Strozzi Heckler, as well as in numerous publications, including Communications of the ACM, Training Magazine, the International Journal for Coaching in Organizations, and the Center for Quality of Management Journal.

The intent of the GLP Program, the CEO program, and others that are in development is to provide generative leadership training that enables people to become more self-generating as leaders, managers, team members, and human beings.  These programs provide what is not currently available from other forms of traditional and mainstream education and development: as an MBA leadership program, providing a new dimension to current forms of management leadership training, management development, and organizational performance development. We believe that we provide an essential element to what may someday be a degree in leadership that offers actual leadership skill, not just leadership studies. The results of the programs are being demonstrated by our GLP participants and graduates and our CEO participants and graduates that now number in the hundreds.

Our ambitions and purpose for generative leadership are not just to be thought of as next generation leadership, but to go beyond the next generation as an important foundation for future developments in leadership.  We believe that it is now possible to have leadership be clear, observable, executable, and learnable with appropriate practice and feedback.  The world is calling leaders to new levels of challenge and our understanding of leadership must provide generative foundations for leadership action and learning.

By Julio Olalla and Robert Dunham

                                     Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

                                                                  T. S. Eliot

We live in an era of global scale.  Our technologies and our massive global population accumulate and magnify our decisions and choices until they affect the entire planet.  At the global level we now have concerns about changing the weather through global warming, running out of water, destroying arable land, bringing thousands of species to extinction, and consuming resources at an unsustainable level.  We believe we can throw garbage “out,” but there is no “out” from the planet – we are living next to our accumulating waste. We have filled the planet and are at or beyond the edges of its capacities. Many say we have exceeded the “carrying capacity” of the planet[i].

At the same time our human systems are in breakdown.  The current financial crisis is the result of massive governmental borrowing against a future that must continue to grow and consume to carry the debt.  Fundamental standards of responsibility, risk management, and honesty have been thrown out in the pursuit of localized greed – for example the real estate bubble that caused the current global recession was created by a system that allowed ridiculous loans that could never be repaid to be made by lenders for the sake of the transaction fees, because the lenders sold the loans and would never be held accountable for the consequences of the loans’ performance.  Consumers took easy credit in a frenzy of consumption and speculation[ii].  Taxpayers vote for government services that they will not pay for[iii].

How did we arrive to such a state?  We are in a moment where the current Human Being faces the reality of the finite Planet and Nature in which we live, and of the consequences of the systems we have invented.  Yet the predominant answer to our problems is “Growth,” more of the same thinking that led us to our current situation.  The authors believe that growth, in the way it is currently thought about, is an aspect of our problem, not our solution.

We must look more deeply into our current cultural blindness, to the roots of how we came to act the way we do and to create the world we have.  If we are to change our world and create a new future, we must first look in the mirror and see what kind of people we have become, what kind of thinking we fall into, and what kind of relationship with our world we have chosen.  The world has become this mirror to the kind of human beings we have become, and we must first reflect on how we became who we are if we are to see a possibility for real change. Although there is new awareness and new interpretations arising in the world, we must face the common sense that led to our current situation.  That is what must change.

What can we see in looking at the world and the way we are in it, beyond our current inadequate and automatic explanations?  We see that a main theme of our civilization is that we ignore nature and our environment as something we must take care of.  We see the natural world only as raw material to be used, and in fact see people as “human resources” in the same way – raw material to be used. We still think and operate as though the world is much bigger than our impact on it, and have not awakened to the scale of impact that we have.  We have been so steeped in the interpretation that everything is for our use that we even use our “selves” as raw material to be used.

Used for what?  For whatever project will produce profit, growth, and financial return regardless of the consequences.  We have placed financial and economic growth as our ultimate value, our only solution, and the driver of our societal purposes.  We also see this as an area of mysterious technical problems, to be solved by the technical experts.  Greece and Italy have just chosen to put “technocrats” in charge of their governments to fix their financial situations.  Other concerns of our societies are considered secondary to our financial requirements, and the intent is to renew economic growth and consumption.

As we look at our world we also do not see the populations of our countries acting with responsibility for the consequences of their actions.  We have turned into a society of consumers getting what they can, willing to receive benefits that they take no responsibility to pay for.  The choices of the individual have been disconnected from the consequences they produce in the aggregate, and we have largely lost the responsibilities of the citizen, only acting from the appetites of the consumer.  We do not think globally and act locally, we tend to act locally and the global consequences are someone else’s problem.

If we look again in the mirror at who we are, we see that we are a culture that has lost meaning and virtue, and we no longer have the notion of a good life as one in harmony with nature, with each other, and for the sake of a healthy future.  We conceive of the good life as a permanent expansion of consumption.  Yet, we never stop and ask for the sake of what do we want to consume more?  We must transcend the common sense that more is better, and look for what is good, not just more.

We have lost public standards of what is important rather than growth, that we must have respect and gratitude for the gifts of life and nature, and not just destroy them in our consumption.  We have lost the place of the sacred, where by “sacred” we do not mean any religious meaning, but we refer to the sacred as those aspects of life that we revere, respect, bring gratitude to, and place higher than self-interest.  For example, our society currently allows companies to put chemicals in our environment that are shown to affect the development of fetuses, because profit is more important than a respect for the health of our children and environment.

How did we come to value our abstractions more than our lives?  How did we come to have numbers dictate our choices rather than our connection to life and meaning?  How did we come to give up our personal and social responsibility to take care of the future and the world we share?   Some would tell a story of the loss of religious life, and the advance of secular logic. But we see a more fundamental interpretation that shows the journey to disconnection in our culture, and the shift that must be addressed.

We live in an era of modernity (some call post-modernity) after five hundred years of the increasing focus on and celebration of science, rationality, and the powers of prediction and control. It has been such a long and deep immersion in this common sense that we can’t see how it has changed us as people.  We live in the story that the universe is just material and without inherent meaning, and that the only source of meaning is our own purposes and desires.  We see reality as raw material for our use, not a place of relationship.  How else can we destroy and befoul what sustains us, physically, emotionally, and spiritually? How else can greed become a virtue and a standard for our entire system of living together? And this has happened because we have exiled the power of emotions from our thinking, and relegated them to the internal, personal world with no relevance in the external world of action.  In fact science took as a first principle that only what can be replicated without bias by an observer, without influence by feelings, was worthy of being held as true and valid.  In this logic we are most effective when we separate from our emotions and our care is only a personal prejudice distorting true dispassionate and rational thinking.

We now have a tremendous problem with these unexamined assumptions that make up our current cultural common sense.  First, the assumption that emotions are not relevant for effective action has been shown to be false. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that rational behavior is not possible without the involvement of the emotional circuits of the brain[iv].  The field of emotional intelligence shows that 90% of the difference between high performing leaders, managers, and organizations and average performance is their emotional skills[v].  And the second problem is that our life long training in abstraction and rational techniques of thinking has left out the most important part of our thinking and choosing – the ethics and choices of meaning, of what we care about, what makes a meaningful and good life, and a good world to share.  We have lost the valuing of what is most valuable, of the gifts of life that we cannot replace.

On a pragmatic basis the environment gives us air, water, and the capacity for food.  Since the environment has been given, rather than produced, it has been taken for granted and not valued.  It has been used in ways that produce tremendous downstream costs that are not paid, because our accounting only values human action, not the essential actions of nature.  This is true at the level of ecology and sustainability, but also at the level of soul and meaning. Nature gives us beauty, is the basis of our own physical vitality and aliveness, and our embodiment gives us the capacities for love, connection and meaning.  And we sacrifice these as well on the altar of economics.

To show our perspective as one of practical action, and not just of fuzzy philosophizing, we must share with you that our life’s work over the last thirty years has been with the pragmatics of developing skills in the cognitive power of emotions, and employing them in order to produce a higher level of capabilities in leadership, management, organizational performance, professional coaching, as well as relationship and living a good life.  We believe that our culture has the insights to not only look in the mirror, but to reengage with the questions of “what is a good life,” “what is a good person,” “what is a good citizen,” and create new answers, actions, and outcomes for a healthy future and a good life.

We must recognize that we cannot impose prediction and control on all of life, and these approaches must not become the foundation of our relationship with life, with each other, the future, and the world. We must give up our consumption addition, we must give up the ethics of cancerous growth, we must recover our responsibility with nature, each other, and the meaning that feeds our souls. We must honor again what our deep care shows us about our choices, we must become emotionally competent to be wielders of the powers we have to reshape our world. We must take responsibility again for the consequences of our choices, both individually and together.

Although we do not claim to have the solutions to our global issues, we do know that in addressing them we must look at what kind of human beings we have become, and we must reconnect and reintegrate our emotional capacities into our thinking.  We must recover our capacity to connect with and care for what is most meaningful and harmonious in life.  We must recover our sense of living in a living world with which we have a relationship, and that this world takes care of us only to the extent we take care of it.  We must look in the mirror and reshape ourselves first if we are to shift how we shape the world.

Next, we will explore how our modern way of thinking has separated us from our soul, that part of us that most deeply connects to our care and meaning in life, and later we will explore the need for the revival of citizenship, a reengagement with our humanity, and a re-grounding of our thinking in the health of our relationships with each other, nature, and our future.

Julio Olalla is founder of Newfield Network, a leading school of coaching in the world, and is considered one of the best coaches in the world. He is author of From Knowledge to Wisdom.

Robert Dunham is founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, and delivers programs in leadership around the world. He is co-author of The Innovator’s Way. 

By Julio Olalla and Robert Dunham

We live in a historical era confronted with unavoidable issues of global scale, issues that have never been faced before in the history of humanity.

Global warming is shifting weather patterns, with many warnings about severe consequences. In the face of urgent calls for global reductions of carbon dioxide emissions China is building two coal fired electricity plants a week. The debate about “peak oil” – when we will have consumed half the oil reserves of the planet – is only about whether it has already happened, or will happen soon, while global energy demand skyrockets and new sources are not ready. The “progress” of development is resulting in the extinction of approximately 150 species per day, reducing biodiversity, which is a key measure of ecological health and resilience. Many of the world’s fisheries are so depleted that there is concern for the possible extinction of key food fish species. Increases in population are pushing the limits of the planet’s supply of drinkable water. Modern farming techniques are resulting in massive losses of soil, and soil fertility. We are running out of planet.

The distribution of wealth worldwide – as of 2000 1% of the population owned 40% of the wealth (1), with the trend continuing very fast to concentrate wealth in the hands of the wealthy – is continuing to widen the gap between rich and poor, a trend towards future instability. An increasingly large segment of the population cannot afford health care and health insurance, currently including around 44 million Americans. The dominant paradigm of “knowledge” is of knowing in mechanical and analytical forms, leaving out wisdom and the human soul. Increasing wealth and development in societies correlates to significantly higher rates of depression, mental illness, and teen suicide. One report in 2000 showed that the average American child reported higher levels of anxiety than the average child under psychiatric care in 1950 (2).

Our efforts to address these issues have so far only resulted in continued increases in the problems. Our solutions are inadequate. We believe that we are experiencing Albert Einstein’s dictum: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

What is the kind of thinking that we are trapped in, and what new thinking will enable us to productively address the challenges of our age? In a series of articles we will address these questions and share with you the result of decades of inquiry into these questions by ourselves and our colleagues. We invite you to a conversation that is a serious inquiry, not just a theoretical discussion of opinions – it is too late for that. The world and the future are at stake.

We must look beyond our quick, obvious, comfortable, and common answers. We must look with new eyes, with new thinking, if we are to find what our old thinking cannot show us. The spirit of this exploration must begin with the simple declaration that we do not know what the solutions are. It is the arrogance of our past successes and past thinking that is most in the way of our facing the real issues behind our growing crises in the world. But not knowing is the place to start when something new has to be invented, revealed, or discovered. We must learn to lead with not-knowing as our starting point.

Although we do not yet know the solutions to the major problems of our age, we can begin to expand the space of possibilities for addressing them by looking at the limitations of how we currently understand these problems and their possible solutions, by exploring what is really at stake, and looking for new foundations for our thinking. In thinking anew, we can look for new directions for our actions.

We can begin with a couple of observations of what is happening around us. First, the very existence of such global scale problems are problems never faced before in history. All such problems were previously localized, and the entire history of ethics never had to face the possibility of putting the entire world in jeopardy. Our capacity to do so arose only in last seventy years, with nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, global use of resources, global warming, population growth, and so on. We do not have any historical standards of ethics for preserving the world and the future for our future generations. We must not only develop them and live by them, we must generate a new capacity to produce global solutions to global problems. We are not organized to produce global alignment among nations and peoples, and so far global problems are regarded as secondary to local interests.

Second, the dramatic scale of expansion of consumption, populations, and expectations for living standards is meeting a finite world of resources. Our answer to meet the demand for growing consumption is still “economic growth.” Growth is the solution that comes from everyone’s lips, yet it clearly is increasing many of our problems. We currently have widespread faith in the religion of growth, the magic of growing production to meet the demand for increasing consumption and jobs for a growing population. Growth has produced many of our problems of global scale, yet we still think of “more” and “growth” as the solution to these problems. We see that this thinking that generated our problems will not solve the problems, only make them worse. We need to think from a new direction.

Our view is that the religion of Growth is a threat not just because it causes the very problem it is to supposed to solve, but because it reveals something even more threatening – the shift in our culture’s thinking that economic values have unquestioned supremacy over any other values in our society. The current answer to all our problems is “growth.” Yet in the biological world, that which grows without limit and without fitting into its environment is a cancer, a threat to the entire ecosystem.

The imperative for More and Better has overcome the Good – the good life is sacrificed for the addiction to the better life. The Aymará people of Bolivia have said it well, that before the Westerners came to their land they lived a good life. And the Westerners destroyed the good life in the constant drive for a better life.

We have confused “more” and “better.”(3) The data shows that the US the economy has doubled over the last 30 years. Over this period the real income of the bottom ninety percent of American taxpayers declined as the wealth concentrated in the hands of the already wealthy. However, indicators of happiness and a healthy society have steadily declined or been stagnant over that period, with dramatic increases in alcoholism, suicide, and depression. This pattern is seen in other developed countries as well, including Japan, the UK, and Chile. We have mistaken “more” for “better.” Then, what is better? What is a healthy economy without being growth addicted? What is a good life?

Although we are raising more questions than we can answer in this article, we will address them in future articles and unfold our exploration of the assumptions that have driven us, the limits of this thinking, and new and old ways to see new paths to a healthy future. What we can say is that our historical era calls for a new level of leadership, leadership that takes responsibility for the consequences of its use of power at the global level, and that takes responsibility with other leaders and citizens for the world that is being created from our collective action.

Next, we will explore how our modern analytical thinking about nature, science, prediction and control is a dynamic of thinking that generates the very problems it tries to solve. We will look at other possible paths for engaging with our challenges.

Julio Olalla is founder of Newfield Network, a leading school of coaching in the world, and is considered one of the best coaches in the world. He is author of From Knowledge to Wisdom.

Robert Dunham is founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, and delivers programs in leadership around the world. He is co-author of The Innovator’s Way.

Terrie is a guest author on our blog, and shares her lessons in leadership.  We will be featuring articles by graduates of the Generative Leadership Program in which they share the results in their lives from generative leadership.  These articles will eventually become part of a book on generative leadership:

leadership lessons in paying attention

by Terrie Lupberger

Looking back, the signs were all there but I failed to acknowledge them.  As CEO of an international learning company for nine years, I had been slowly snipping off the corners of myself, unknowingly, bit by bit, in order to fit into a role that no longer served me or I it.  Instead of paying attention to my declining health and mood, I plunged deeper into busyness and drove myself (and, unfortunately, everyone around me) even harder.  When the President and I finally had the conversation and agreed it was time for me to step down I was overcome, surprisingly, with relief.

In retrospect I see that I was a leader who had lost touch with what I most cared about. I was no longer in touch with the meaning my work had always provided me. The direction we were headed was no longer aligned with the newly emerging vision I had for my life.  I had lost my vitality and joy.  As a dear friend of mine said to me during those difficult days, “Terrie, you were out on the skinny branch – you know the one that easily breaks with a strong wind.  You were so busy and overwhelmed and out of touch with your own values, cares and vision that you failed to pay attention to the breaking branch.”

It was a difficult transition.  I had to face my own critical self-assessments, ‘blind spots’ and leadership weaknesses.  I had to learn to separate my work and career from my sense of self-worth and value.  I had to get clear about the future I wanted to design vs. what others wanted and expected from me.  As with any transition, there have also been many positive outcomes as well not the least of which is that this experience has made me more sensitive and valuable to the clients I work with.

My experience is a common one among leaders and business professionals.  We are deluged on a daily basis with details, problems, possibilities, conversations, meetings, action steps, spreadsheets, stakeholder demands, customer requests.  (If you are a woman you can likely add to this equation your other priority as a mother or care-giver.)  It’s easy to ignore the external and internal messages warning us that we are in overwhelm, out of touch, or heading off-course.  It’s easy to lose sight of what we most care about and when we do, we end up drained, depleted or worse. Days, months, even years go by as we slowly and unknowingly creep out onto that skinny branch where it’s just a matter of time before a good strong wind causes the branch to break and takes the form of illness, depression, complacency, burn-out or worse.

Serendipitously, it was during this time that I was a participant in the Generative Leadership Program offered at the Institute for Generative Leadership.  While a good part of the work I do now is with women leaders, what I deeply value about the program is that it transcends gender and speaks to the more fundamental issues of what it means to be human and how to leverage and use that awareness to be the kind of leader that can help address the uncertainty, complexity and chaos of our times.  I work with both women and men leaders who tell me that they are kept awake at night not so much by the drive for another 10% of profit or productivity improvement but by how they can create a better team or be a more supportive leader in order to generate a more sustainable future for their organization (and planet).

I had enrolled into the program because I, too, wanted greater awareness into how to be a better leader.  One of my favorite sayings is ‘without awareness you don’t have choice, you have habits’.  I wanted to take a look at the habits I had formed as a leader that weren’t serving me or the organization.  While I learned many useful and immediately applicable leadership skills from this very unique and powerful body of work, there are three important lessons I learned about the power of paying attention that might be relevant to any of you reading this who suspect that you, too, are out on that skinny branch.

Lesson #1 -Leaders pay attention to meaning

Leaders ensure that the actions of their teams and the individual contributors are in alignment with the objectives and goals of the organization and that those actions are as efficient and effective as possible to achieve success (however that is defined).  That’s a very functional and common interpretation of leadership.  However, some contemporary thinkers and writers on the topic of leadership would say we’ve become painfully obsessed with ‘effectiveness’ in our culture to the detriment of satisfaction, enjoyment and meaning in the workplace.

Consider that another interpretation of leadership is that leaders also create meaning for those effective actions.  Great leaders help connect what the individuals in the organization are doing to what they care about.  They help align those individual cares with the bigger picture of why the organization exists and what the organization is taking care of through its work.

Why does this matter?   Because meaning provides purpose and people with purpose will take intentional action – actions taken by design and thoughtfulness – not actions that are simply the result of reacting to circumstances.  They will bring more enthusiasm and creativity to their work.  In 2008, the McKinsey Quarterly published a piece on Centered Leadership, How Talented Women Thrive.  They concluded that meaning in their work is extremely important to women leaders and that meaning (for both men and women) is one of the motivators that lead to greater job satisfaction and higher productivity.

In the book Flow, the author, Csikszentmihalyi, concludes that the meaning of life turns out to be astonishingly simple.
“The meaning of life is meaning:  whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life.”  Contrary to our cultural conditioning, meaning isn’t relegated to only our personal lives.  Meaning is an essential element at work as well.  We invest too much time and energy at work to have meaning absent from such a huge part of our lives.

Consider that meaning is based on what we care about.  In fact, you can’t generate meaning without knowing what it is you care about.  A leader connected and aligned to what they care about is a powerful organizational force.  They create compelling visions and possibilities for the individuals in the organization to align their own cares with.  They paint a picture of the future that others want to be part of.  They build a bridge between what the individual cares about and how that ties in with the mission/vision/work of the organization.  You can actually sense it when you walk into an organization where the members are operating from their care.

Contrast that image with an organization where the members and leaders are not connected to what they care about.  The tasks themselves become empty, tedious if not downright laborious.  It’s not uncommon for the members to feel like they are sacrificing for a paycheck or job security.  It’s hard to be creative and innovate from that place.

It was in the Generative Leadership Program that I began to seriously reflect on the questions ‘what do I care about?’  ‘what am I taking care of through my work and life?’   I realized I wasn’t connected to my cares and wasn’t being effective at helping others connect their cares to the organization’s mission.  I was going through the motions doing what I knew to do, what was familiar and known but without the enthusiasm or creativity that usually accompanied it.  I also didn’t want to admit that my vision for the future would take me in a different direction.  This role had become my identity.  Who would I be if not this? When I finally created some space and time to consider what mattered most to me, I realized that it had changed over the years and without the awareness of that I kept trying to fit myself into a role that no longer fit.

Lesson #2 – Leaders pay attention to where their attention is going

In addition to learning that I wasn’t paying attention to how care was showing up for me or the other members in my organization, I also realized that part of my burnout resulted from me putting attention on the wrong things as well.

After nine years of birthing and growing a start-up, I was still doing some of the same tasks I did when we were just starting out – when all of us did whatever it took to keep the business going.  In the habit of performing and doing the work, I was now neglecting some of the more critical tasks related to building thriving teams, developing individual talent
and great performers and scaling the business.

This, too, is a pretty common phenomenon among leaders.  Most rise through the ranks because of their competence
at getting the job done.  They have technical expertise and often work harder than anyone else.

This was my path as well. I started my career as a senior financial analyst but three years later was assigned to lead a branch of 50+ employees – with zero management training.  I ran as fast as I could, metaphorically speaking, to fill in all the gaps of knowledge, skills and abilities that the job required that I didn’t have.  I was a stellar ‘performer’ thrust into management.  As my career progressed, I was promoted into various leadership positions but still kept performing and doing the work.  I didn’t know that leaders are not performers.  Rather, leaders are the customers for good performers and are responsible for growing good performers.  I’m not talking about the traditional definition of customer here where you have someone external to a company who buys something. In this context I mean a customer is anyone to whom you make a promise.

This distinction was perhaps the most powerful one I learned in the GLP program.  Leaders elicit promises from their teams and individual contributors that, when all combined, ensure that the desired outcomes and success measures of the organization are accomplished.  To be a good customer for these promises leaders have to make clear requests, let the performers know when they aren’t performing to standards or deadlines, coach and support the performers to address or resolve issues jeopardizing the fulfillment of their promises, declare when they are satisfied and when they aren’t satisfied, make assessments of the performers along the way, help connect the promises to why it matters to the performer and the organization and help manage the moods so the most conducive context is established for success.

The competencies and skills needed to be a stellar leader are different, as you can see, than the ones needed to be a stellar performer.  Interesting enough, moving out of the “performer” role into the leadership role is one of the most essential yet difficult transitions there is in organizational life.  It’s also one of the most common contributors to burn-out.

Lesson #3 – Leaders pay attention to mood

I discovered that inattention to care and meaning plus trying to be a stellar performer and leader quickly led to moods of overwhelm and resentment.  Besides not being personally satisfying, these moods had a direct impact on the actions and results of the entire organization. 

Actually, all the moods and emotions we fall into or bring to our work influence the outcomes we are working towards.  Moods and emotions predispose us to take certain actions and to not take other actions.  They influence what we say and
what we don’t say.

For example, a team that operates out of a mood of resignation will take different actions and have different conversations and produce different outcomes than a team that operates out of enthusiasm or optimism.  Consider that the difference between commitment and compliance in a team is mood; high performing teams will work in moods such as tenacity, optimism and ambition whereas low performing teams will often find themselves in the mood of resentment, resignation, frustration or impotence.

The traditional understanding of leadership treats the topic of emotional intelligence lightly and usually only in terms of “motivation” or “changing the corporate culture”.  It rarely goes so far as to show leaders, teams and individuals how to generate productive and powerful moods yet it is in the emotional dimension where commitment, inspiration, motivation, ownership and taking care of others live.   Leadership actually requires a competence in provoking and managing the moods in the organization. The moods leaders generate can either engage and inspire the individuals and teams to better performance or discourage and deter them from great performance.

While at the GLP program, I saw that I had become like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water.  I had said “yes” to more promises than I could fulfill.  Add to that my challenge with saying “no” and my other priorities of family, self-care, and community and I had a fool-proof recipe for overwhelm and burn-out.  I often found myself discouraged and
frustrated but I wasn’t paying attention to the ‘why’.   Caught in my own moods of frustration and resignation, I certainly wasn’t able to inspire those around me either.

Connected with the earlier discussion on meaning, it’s interesting to note that meaning itself resides in an emotional space.  When you think of it, meaning is inconceivable without emotion.  Meaning isn’t an intellectual construction, but rather an emotional response to what we care about.

As a leader,  you can either pay attention to and manage the moods (including your own) in the organization or, as happens too frequently, you can ignore them and pay the price of lower job-satisfaction, lower productivity, waste, inefficiencies, lack of innovation and creativity, to name a few. You either manage the moods or they will end up running you and the organization.

SUMMARY

As Bob Dunham, founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership says ‘doing more is a common but primitive strategy for success.’  In my case, doing more was my strategy for success until it finally stopped working (and this strategy always stops working at some point in your career).

As with most challenges, life can look pretty bleak while we are going through them, but we usually end up in a better, more powerful position once we’ve weathered them.  There’s a lot we can learn from these life events if we pay attention.  In fact, learning how to better pay attention is an essential leadership and life skill for ending suffering and living a good
life.  Without awareness you will end up enduring situations, events, and people that aren’t a fit for the future you want to
generate.

One of the outcomes of me listening more deeply to my own cares is the work I’m now doing in helping women leaders, in all professions, have greater impact with more ease and joy.    My work is to help them have the courage and the clarity for taking the next steps as trailblazers for a different future.

As M. Borax and E. Lonsdale state in their book Cosmic Weather Report: Notes from the Edge of the Universe “We stand at an evolutionary crossroads. Fearand resistance are inevitable. Human nature stubbornly clings to the old even when the old is obsolete. But each of us has tremendous power packed within. Each has a core force that can be ignited to blaze a trail to a whole new era.”

Most of the women leaders I know report that they have been experiencing, for some time now, a growing uneasiness, frustration and sense of urgency that our culture is not reflecting the greatest expression of itself. They speak of how exasperating it is to watch the extreme separation and polarization transpiring in most fields of human concerns – in politics, education, religion, the environment, etc. The world they are experiencing isn’t reflective of the world they desire or know is possible and they want to learn how to make a greater impact and help generate new ways of thinking and being and taking action in their communities, organizations, and the world.

The crises we are all facing will not be resolved with the same thinking or actions that created it.  As a society, as communities, as organizations, as teams, as leaders we are out on that skinny branch and it’s time to pay attention.

We invite you to explore the questions below.  They are designed to provoke your thinking and may be difficult in the sense that you don’t arrive to quick or easy answers.  They are, however, worth considering for the sake of the leader you want to become and the impact you want to make:
What do you care about?
Are your actions (is what you are ‘doing’) consistent and aligned with those cares?
What’s the mood you’re in at work these days?
In your leading of others, are you creating the moods conducive to the outcomes you are seeking?
How are you generating meaning in your workplace for others?
What do you need to pay attention to, that if
you did, would make a significant impact in your leadership impact?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terrie Lupberger is a Senior Executive coach, consultant and author.  She works at the intersections of leadership, philosophy, and coaching to help leaders have more impact in their organizations and the world.

In her earlier career she was the former CEO of Newfield Network, Inc., a board member of the International Coach Federation, partner in an IT consulting firm, and a senior manager in two federal agencies.  She has been coaching executives, managers and leaders since 1995 and is currently part of the TED Coaching Initiative.  She is a contributing author to The Handbook of Knowledge Based Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Wiley, 2009).  She has written an article on  the topic of care that is featured on the Huffington Post – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terrie-upshurlupberger/nothing-without-labor_b_750882.html

Terrie has studied with some of the world’s greatest teachers and thinkers out of her belief that the more expanded our thinking is, the more able we are  to design and generate successful outcomes.  This combination of experience and education has given her a unique set of tools, methods and perspectives in helping others get quickly to the heart of an issue and design new solutions to old problems.  As one of her recent client’s said: Terrie’s experience, knowledge,
sensitivity and straight-up authentic style of communicating all created a winning combination for us. If you want someone who can get real results in the development of others’ effectiveness, I highly recommend her.

Contact Terrie at terrie@terrielupberger.com.

I wrote the letter below on 9/17/2001 to the generative leadership learning community, since I was in New York on 9/11, and in the World Trade Center minutes before the first plane hit. It’s reflections of the change and challenge of 9/11 still ring true for me…

Thank You for Your Care

I extend my thanks to the many of you who contacted us with concern for me during the tragedy in New York.  It was touching and grounding to know that those in our network were reaching out to us, and this was a welcome support to my family as I was separated from them during last week.

I was in New York City for a conference for Chief Learning Officers, which opened on Sept. 11 in downtown Manhattan.  I was staying with Helen Miller, the sister of my friend and collaborator JanIrene Perkins, in Jersey City across the river from the World Trade Center.  We took the ferry across the river to the World Financial Center, and I walked through the mall underneath the World Trade Center Towers to get to the subway about half an hour before the first plane hit.  I was struck by the sheer mass of people that were walking through the facility.  There were lines at the counters for tourists preparing to tour the towers.

I was at my conference at mid-town in Manhattan by 8:50, and didn’t know about the attack until it was announced after the first speaker at 9:45.  Helen, who works at a Wall Street location, evacuated her building, and was walking back to towards the towers to get the ferry home when the first tower collapsed.  She was two blocks away, and had to run for her life.  She eventually made it home at 6:00pm after taking the Staten Island ferry.

I watched the televised reports and my gut sank with the buildings as they fell, and something immense beyond buildings broke in our world.  I watched until early afternoon, and then walked to the ferry station on the west side of Manhattan.  There was about a five-hour line to the ferries when I got there, and the line grew steadily behind me.  The subways, bridges, and tunnels had been closed, although one bridge was open to foot traffic.  For many, this was the only way they could get back to New Jersey.  The people in line were calm, and extremely civil.  I eventually took a bus to a location where cruise liners had been enlisted to ferry people.  I wound up taking a tugboat with seventy other people, as many craft were being used to ferry us.

As I walked from the ferry terminal a mile to Hoboken, a group of blue-collar workers were gathered on the sidewalk, offering people drinks of water in paper cups.  I felt ennobled by their acts, and more so by their spirit of support and solidarity.

Helen came to pick me up in Hoboken, and we returned to her apartment.  She had Miguel, a worker from her company’s mail room, staying, because he could not get home that night.  Since Miguel spoke little English, Helen expanded her dish-TV subscription to include Spanish channels, so that Miguel could also have news.  We alternately watched the news in Spanish and English.  Miguel lives in Queens, and left the next day, successfully making it home that night.

As for most of us, I experienced shock, grief, sadness, isolation, anger, hate, desolation, compassion, pride at the courage of others, and anxiety in the first days after.  I wondered what I could do, how our future has been shifted, and what we will face in this new future.  I have been reflecting on how we will rebuild our future, and believe this is a question for design that challenges us all to participate in.

I was able to get a flight back from Newark to San Francisco on Saturday morning, and found that people were serious and calm.  The flight crew was in an extraordinary mood of openness and care. I see that air travel, although a vehicle for the attack, is being made safe with the precautions that are being taken.

Our tragedy can lead us to fear, to anger, even hate, and to contract in our living.  I believe it is a time to extend, not contract, to connect with others, and to explore how we will respond to this event, personally, communally, and nationally.  I believe that the work that we do is needed even more, now that we must learn to design in a world with increased danger.  We must learn to build a new level of trust, new practices for prudence, and to connect to a world that can no longer be ignored.

These are not times that are beyond our own individual actions.  Our personal interpretations and actions will determine how we will live and experience living, and shape our relationships with others.  If we are not to drift in fear and reaction, we must review and perhaps redesign the Selves that we are, how we will relate to others, and how we will relate to our world.

I plan to continue to travel as part of our work, and to include in our concerns, learning, and design the challenges of facing a changing world, and rebuilding our future together.  I invite you in your participation in our community of leadership and learning to explore deeply the issues and challenges of our new future, and the opportunities for design of how we will make a world in which we can live together with others.

With Resolve and Love,

Bob Dunham

Once upon a time long ago in a fair land, people worked hard, saved, and lived a good life. In the United States they called it the American Dream, that any hard working, diligent citizen could create a middle class life.

Then things changed, and real estate began to inflatedramatically.  The game changed, and saving made you a loser – if you saved you probably didn’t get on the escalator of rising home prices.  Making money was now about borrowing, acquisition, timing, and making a play at the right time.  Hard work and thrift seemed to no
longer be a road to financial success, except as a house down payment.

The rules had changed, and slowly many people began to understand the new rules.  Real estate became the best investment a family could make. Then the rules changed again for the banks and financial institutions.  You didn’t even have to save or have money to buy a house; the new game was getting and making loans – using other people’s money.

Lending institutions found out they could sell loans to others to hold and no longer have any risk on the performance of the loans.  They just had to make loans and then get rid of them – they began to push loans to whoever could sign the papers.  As an example, in Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000[i]. And the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis were planted.  Bad loans became an industry, and the ratings agencies rated these loans as safe due to a weird logic that groups of bad loans were somehow safe as a pool of loans.  It became a feeding frenzy of making money by moving more loans, and deferring the risks to others.

When the default rates started to rise, as they had to, an awakening dawned on all the players that huge blocks of investments were going to fail. When the realization happened, Bear Stearns, for example, a global investment bank and securities trading and brokerage that held considerable subprime mortgage securities went out of business in a matter of days.  The financial system was rocked, some other huge companies disappeared, but mostly credit from the banks dried up and the financial fuel supply for the entire economy was shut down.

The International Monetary Fund later estimated that losses from the subprime market collapse amounted to a trillion dollars. But what the collapse triggered is many times that amount in its continuing economic impact.  The period of 2008 and 2009 is now referred as the Great Recession, bringing us TARP, bail-outs, and the stimulus package in faltering attempts to get the economy functioning again.

And at this date the US government is generating record deficits of over a trillion dollars a year, the debt ceiling became a political battle ground, Standard and Poors downgraded the rating of US government debt, and the stock market is wobbling with uncertainties.  Recent polls find that over eighty percent of the American population has no trust in government to effectively deal with these economic issues.

What happened? And what can we do in this era where the world can shift to such craziness? How do we manage our future in this world, and help our organizations and clients to do the same?

I believe that we are seeing the consequences of a discourse that has pushed our world to its limits.  This discourse is called “More.”  This discourse says “More is Better,” and “Only Now Matters.”  These are such strong messages and assumptions in the current common sense, they are not even questioned.  In fact, they are
the default answers – we must grow the economy, and do it now – regardless of future consequences.  Growth is The Answer. Somehow our addiction to More makes it the solution to the very problems it has created.

But growth is already pressing at what scientists call “the carrying capacity” of the planet.  We are on a trend to outstrip our water supplies, we are eroding and reducing the fertility of farmable soil, global warming is happening, with calls to reduce global carbon emissions we continue to increase them, with China building two coal-fired electricity plants per week, and have passed or are quickly approaching “peak oil,” the point where over half the oil reserves of the planet have been exhausted.  We are running out of planet.

And what has More produced so far? As GNP’s grow, so do the rates of depression, teen suicide, and alcoholism. The US GNP has doubled since the 1990’s, but the bottom 90% of the population has seen their average income decline during that period. The wealth concentrates in the top ten percent of the population, and mostly in the top two percent.  Fifty percent of the wealth of the planet is currently owned by one percent of the population, not a trend suggesting future stability. Depression was identified in 2007 by the World Health Organization as the most significant chronic global health issue, outstripping heart disease, asthma, and diabetes.

Studies show that increased income does not produce greater happiness.  In fact, happiness measures in developed countries have continued to decline as GNP has grown.  More is not better, it is just more, and apparently more burden.  When you are poor, more is better, but studies show that increased income does not produce greater happiness after about $10,000 annual income.  In other words, our richer life style does not make us happier.

The addiction to the growth story is linked to the narrative of “the better life.”  If we are always seeking a better
life, we will never have a good life.

I believe that each of us must revive the conversation of a Good Life, not only a better life.  What is a Good Life? We must take responsibility for the future consequences of our choices. What future are we giving our children and grandchildren?  In German there is a phrase meaning “The flood comes after me.”  It’s a mood that we don’t have to worry about future problems from our choices.  I propose that what is needed is another ethic, one that inhabits our awareness and choices, not just our good ideas.  One is suggested by the tradition of the Iroquois Indians.  When the tribe makes an important decision, their standard is to ask “what will be the consequences for the next seven generations?”  And separate from the theme of stewardship for future generations, I believe our deeper challenge is to learn to be where we are in gratitude, and not always need to be somewhere else.

What is the Good Life we can have that is not always the life we don’t have?

It’s funny how we can be next to someone, but not be with them. It makes me sad to see couples in restaurants sharing a meal, but in silence, not even sharing eye contact.  And we have all had the experience of having our attention wander when we’re interacting with someone else, or trying to focus on something.  We suddenly realize we aren’t focused on what we had intended, and bring ourselves back to the moment – or we don’t.

We also notice immediately when someone else isn’t really present with us.  They’re in their heads thinking about something else, perhaps looking at their email or cell phone, or looking off at something other than us.  My wife calls me in those moments, saying “Where’d you go?” This usually this calls me back to the moment, to being with her, although sometimes I find it hard to come back, to let go of what had dragged my attention from the moment. It’s as though the reality of my thoughts and concerns, taking me to the past, the future, and places other than where I am, sometimes have more weight than the actual moment of my life that I’m living – or at least existing in.

Where are you?  The answer is simple:  you are where your attention is. Not where your body is.

The consequences of where our attention goes are immense. Our attention is the foundation of whether communication, trust, coordination, and even love are possible, and the quality with which they are available. These are all based on the quality of our presence and our capacity for connection, which are outcomes of our attention.

Attention shapes our presence – whether we are “in attendance” or not.  Presence is acknowledged to be part of
leadership with the phrase “leadership presence,” but is fundamental to any interaction or relationship we have with others as well.  We show up with presence – or absence. We are either “attending,” or we are “elsewhere,” not present.

Another huge impact of our attention is our capacity for connection or disconnection. We must bring our attention and be present in order to enable connection.  We all hunger for connection.  Human beings are wired for connection, we are social creatures.  Communication is based on “communing,” on connecting.  Love,
friendship, effective communication, teamwork, belonging, loyalty, trust, and having a sense of dwelling – being at home – all require connection.  In the world of action disconnection shows up as distrust, lack of commitment or ownership, lack of listening, lack of care, value, respect, and satisfaction, as well as mis-coordination.

In one of his stories the novelist James Joyce wrote “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”  And this
disconnection provokes the question: is this really living?  What is it to engage in full living, full aliveness? And to share this with others?

One thing I am sure of, we cannot be fully connected to someone else if we are not connected to ourselves, to our own body, and to the present moment.  And without connection relationship turns into the pain of loneliness, communication turns into a ping pong of information and assessments, and coordination turns into pushing and manipulating.

Yet with all these astounding consequences to our attention we live in a culture where we are not trained to pay attention to our attention. Our attention wanders, and in the current age, we are assaulted with opportunities to have our attention captured with novelty, media, cellphones, and computers, as well as drugs and stimulants, reality tv, and an industry of gossip.  We live in an era of constant stimulation to take our attention from us.

We also live in a culture that has elevated cognitive skill as the dominant mode of knowing and way of being. Yet when we go fully to our mind and into thought, or more often when thoughts take our attention, we enter a form of disconnection – we disconnect from others, from the moment, from our bodies and emotions, even from ourselves. We can become the hostages of our thought, enter a world of abstractions, and someone else is driving the bus of our attention.

Sharing life, sharing the future, is in our culture an exercise in what we sometimes call “leadership.” In exploring leadership, my colleagues and I have found that the greatest challenge of leadership is not understanding what it is, but in embodying it.  And the greatest challenge of leadership, as well as relationship, if not life, is to be fully awake, aware, and attending to the present moment.  Awareness creates choice, and choice is an exercise of attention and connection.  We connect to what we attend to.  It is always an exercise of the current moment, the human moment, the leadership moment.

What is it that we must learn to connect to if we are to have choice, and share a world with others?  To connect to the current moment, and in that moment, to connect to another, as well as to our own care, bodies and emotions. This is a skill, a capacity that grows with practice in paying attention to our attention, to our presence and connection, and to the quality of what we produce in our connections.  This is where life happens, leadership happens, relationship happens, action and taking care happens, and where we create the future we share with others.

Where are you?  Where your attention and connection – or disconnection – have taken you, with or without your choice.