Genuine Contact™ Program: Processes for Reducing the Cost of Conflict - Part III

Dates: March 5-6, 2009
Where: Val-David, Quebec
Module 3 of the Genuine Contact Program

Additional Information: info@mbureau.com
Registration Form: http://www.integralvisions.com/sessions.htm

I have been learning to know and trust the amazing capacity of human beings to make the choices that will work for them, trusting their wisdom to do what they are able to do to sustain life in themselves and their organizations. In conversations with leaders of today’s high pressure workplaces, I hear their struggles with these difficult choices. First, if they agree to move forward with a new approach, they are admitting that they couldn’t solve these problems themselves. They may also already see that they have contributed to this situation. These are both hard pills to swallow! They will undoubtedly have to let go of some well entrenched beliefs about people needing to be managed and controlled – beliefs that have been reinforced throughout much of their career and training – despite libraries of research and documentation that question the utility of authoritarian control practices and question the ability of old ways of thinking to create new results.

I remember reading a Harvard Business Review article on a plane one day about 13-14 years ago while I was working as a regional manager in a federal government department. As I read this article about new approaches to leadership and participative management I was thinking yes, yes, yes! Then I checked the references and was horrified to see that I had been reading a reprint of a Harvard classic published some 20 years before. What???? How could this be that I was still feeling like I was pushing water up hill to get ideas about participative processes accepted when this was old news?? How indeed! Sadly the integration of new ideas into our workplace systems seems to take a long time. This is not because leaders are ill intentioned.

How many leaders have the time to read what leading edge researchers are saying? And if they do, the step from reading to applying new ways of working in the midst of intense and high pressure work demands is daunting. I have much empathy for today’s leaders who want to see different results but just don’t know “how” to get there. And the “how” that we are offering invites them to be vulnerable, to let go of the old practices and somehow touch and work from their authentic humanness. This is an inner place we all have the capacity to work from and the source from which authentic and courageous leaders work, however leaders may not have a lot of practice in accessing and working from this level.

I love the work of MIT’s Otto Scharmer who calls this inner source the “blind spot of leadership”. Scharmer talks about noticing in his work with leadership teams “that leaders could not meet their existing challenges by operating only on the basis of past experiences.” He talks about a “deeper learning cycle based on one’s sensing of an emerging future, rather than one’s past experiences”. He calls learning or acting from this source as “presencing”. “It means to sense and bring into the present one’s highest future potential – the future that depends on us to bring it into being”4. I immediately recognize what he is talking about from my own journey and remember how lonely and scary it sometimes feels to be part of birthing of something new. And I also know with certainty that it must be done.

more tomorrow...

Source : Donna Clark : http://www.emergentfutures.ca/articles/Conflict.pdf
Photo :http://www.sxc.hu/photo/505709