Tag: Dee Hock

Mushrooms

David Herbert3 Comments

Mushrooms, by Sylvia Plath, is my poem of the month. Do you want to know what it’s about? One person says it’s about mushrooms. The beauty of poetry is its surplus of meaning. Poems mean a lot – a lot more than the sum of their words and usually a lot more than the poet intends.

Context matters. Friend Helen Scarisbrick, who always wants to explore chaos and complexity, introduced this poem as part of opening worship for a leadership day in the Diocese of Chester alongside the parable of the mustard seed.

Jesus said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we sue to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.

Instantly the poem becomes much more than about mushrooms. It was then a poem about everything that ever lives – for me, anyway, who carries at the back of my mind these words from Dee Hock, (founder of Visa), railing against failed command and control methods and thinking his way to a better understanding of life from the earth beneath his feet. In Birth of the Chaordic Age he wrote the words which forever challenge my understanding of organisation and leadership:

Soil is building as thousands of gophers, mice and moles work assiduously carrying grass underground and dirt to the surface. Beneath us, billions of worms, ants, beetles and other creatures till the soil around the clock. Trillions of microscopic creatures live, excrete, die beneath my feet, fulfilling their destiny and mine as well, just as surely as fulfil theirs.

In that context it becomes a poem about the power of perseverance, the power in weakness, the place of the seed. It becomes a reminder of the organisms that are part of our organisation which we ignore or oversimplify to our peril, and a reminder that there is “room” in “mushroom” to think again about life, organisation and leadership. It becomes a reminder of what and who we don’t notice, a voice for the voiceless. That makes it my Poem of the Month.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

PS. Mushrooms is from Sylvia Plath’s first collection of poems, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960).

To Blog or Not – that is the question

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linda-and-mary-blogger

Dear Linda and Mary (I’ve changed your names)

I was interested by your question, whether to blog or not. I thought I’d use a blog post to respond. It might seem less personal than an email response, or over the desk conversation, but others might be able to eavesdrop on this conversation if I blog in answer to your question. (And that is just one of the advantages of blogging.)

I have hit a brick wall with my blogging recently. I had thought that those who were posting had become more “expert” about their content. That was off-putting and intimidating. That might just have been an excuse I was using because I wasn’t finding the time for blogging (and I didn’t seem to have any inspiration). Here’s a summary of excuses I could have used (and being able to make these links is another advantage of blogging).

But your question has caused me to re-think.

You will notice from blogs you’ve read that there is a lot of learning contained in people’s posts. There is a lot of expertise on technical matters, as, for example, in this post on how to set up a blog (which you may find useful). But then, you really don’t have to be an expert to blog. I regard my blog as a memory bank – a jog for my memory and a way of reflecting on what I notice. It’s a workbench on which I can hammer out a few ideas. They’ll never be finished or finely polished, but I am learning and the blog is a useful place to put some of that learning.

I also don’t see any point in keeping things to myself. I do have a heart for some things and I do have a voice which is not to be kept silent, in spite of my introverted nature. I don’t believe that any of us should hide our light under a bushel (particularly in dark times) and I do believe that we should be sharing what we know in as many ways as we can.

But then, there are people who complain of the noise. They say that there is so much out there – so much noise, but so little sense: so much information but so little wisdom. Probably the same complaint has echoed through human history, from the time we started to talk, to the advent of the postal services, to the current development of online social media (social media is as old as our talk). Unless we use our intelligence to interpret the noise our talk will be babble, our mail will be junk and our conversation meaningless. Blogging is just another way of talking things through together – a way of publishing. Nobody needs to buy into what we have to say – but it is what we have to say, it is our part of the conversation. (I tried working this out in a post I called Chitter-Chatter five years ago – see how I can refer back to what I have done?)

I do have a bit of a problem about how social media fits my work culture. It’s widely seen as a distraction. But if we work by sharing then blogging seems an ideal means to that end.

I would be interested in what you have to say because I know that you are in unique situations and I would love to know what you are making of those situations given your own passions and interests. I won’t promise to keep up with your posts if you do choose to blog though I will click the “follow” button.

It doesn’t really matter to me how many “readers” or followers we have. I think I am the main beneficiary of my own blog because of the opportunity it gives me to do some creative writing, because it gives somewhere to put my stuff, because it helps me work things out of me and because it makes me interesting to me.

Happy blogging
David

PS You might be interested in this no-excuses guide to blogging from Sacha Chua. She suggests that you always start with a question when you blog. So I did. To blog or not to blog – I am grateful that you asked me the question. Why not have a look at Sacha’s blog for some inspiration?

Thinking Leadership with Dee Hock and Meg Wheatley

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“True leaders are those who epitomise the general sense of the community – who symbolise, legitimise and strengthen behaviour in accordance with the sense of the community – who enable its conscious, shared values and beliefs to emerge, expand and be transmitted from generation to generation.”

Dee Hock in Birth of the Chaordic Age

Meg Wheatley, from a perspective of “new science” (quantum rather than Newtonian) sums up what leaders are for:

“People need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access, resources, trust and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organisation, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources.”

Frazzled institutions

David Herbert2 Comments

NetWork

The photograph by Cea is Branching Morphogenesis, a walk-through installation by Jenny Sabin, consisting of 75,000 cable ties resembling neural net of the brain. This is a pattern and organising structure at the heart of our nature – and a far cry from institutional patterns highlighted by the likes of Virginia Woolf in an earlier post.

Diarmuid O’Murchu calls institutions “frazzled” in Adult Faith. The financial crisis of 2008 has reminded us that “banking institutions are more vulnerable than anybody had suspected”. O’Murchu’s observation that “all major institutions are in a state of identity crisis” reflects Dee Hock’s view of “organisations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour scarce resources, demean the human spirit and destroy the environment.” (Birth of the Chaordic Age, p 28). He lists:

  • Schools that can’t teach
  • universities far from universal
  • corporations that can neither cooperate or compete, only consolidate
  • unhealthy health-care systems
  • welfare systems in which no one fares well
  • farming systems that destroy soil and poison food
  • families far from familial
  • police that can’t enforce the law
  • judicial systems without justice
  • governments that can’t govern
  • economies that can’t economise

Hock’s comment on this is that “such universal, ever accelerated institutional failure suggests there is some deep, pervasive question we have not asked.”

One question I often bear in mind in relationships is “how big or small do I now feel?” Our usual answer is “small” in relation to institutional life. There’s not much we feel we can do except for the institution in which we walk tall and big ourselves up in relation to everyone else. We walk away, in increasing numbers, where we can.

For Hock, the problem is our “Industrial Age organisational concept” which is “a wrong concept of organisation and leadership based on a false metaphor with which we must deal. Until our consciousness of the relational aspect of the world and all life therein shall change, the problems that crush the young and make grown people cry will get progressively worse.”

For O’Murchu “all the major institutions we know today evolved as instruments for the implementation of patriarchal power. Many are beaking down and losing credibility, giving way to networks with a greater potential for collaboration and adult empowerment”. For O’Murchu institutions “inherently disempower” however democratic they may try to be. “No matter how democratic a hierarchical system is, it will fail to do justice to the aspirations of the people. People want to participate. They want to be involved; in a word, they want to exercise their adult creativity. And when that goal is jeopardised, it is then we need policing … the prevailing power – culturally, politically, religiously – feeds power. Only in a minimal and superficial way does it empower.”

Competition and control are the assumed guiding principles for institutions and our evolutionary history. But work done by micro-biologist Lynn Margulis suggests a paradigm shift to our thinking and our organisation. Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis highlights an orientation for cooperation rather than competition.

Human imagination has been “domesticated” by institutions, according to O’Murchu, so that the “human being is seen primarily as a deviant creature whose behaviour has to be tightly controlled. Instead of being perceived as creative adults, whose long evolutionary history verifies … a heavy commitment to conviviality and collaboration, humans have been subjected to highly destructive imperial control.”

O’Murchu suggests that there are other “structural strategies” besides institutions with their “top-down hierarchical line of control, usually with clear distinctions between “us” (at the top) and “them” (at the base)”.

I suppose that our institutional framework has been shaped by the myth of The Fall. But there is a dangerous circularity to that assumption. The argument may be that the Fall accounts for human sinfulness which needs to be controlled (by institutions). But institutions (religious) account for the Fall. One depends on the other as is being increasingly recognised. The emperor/institution really is in the all together.

In some ways the church has been tarred with the same brush and there is decline in confidence and “bums on seats”. But then there is another more hopeful sense in which some Christians are behaving less like institutionalised “bums on seats” who are envisaging alternative structures for the sake of the least, last and lost.

Developing viable alternative structures seems vital (as well as inevitable) in a world in which  institutions have become so devalued. Alternative structures are already emerging in the form of networks but the context for that emergence is still governed by institutions who become ever more fearful and seem ever more remote from a (human) nature that is essentially cooperative, collaborative and convivial.

 

a most inspiring award

David Herbert3 Comments

Well, blow me down. I’ve received a nomination for  a Very Inspiring Blogger Award from Ivon from his Teacher as Transformer blog.

Isn’t that lovely? And isn’t the award a great way of building community? Now, I’ve got to nominate 15 other blogs and their authors as “Very Inspiring”, by which I mean that their blogs are inspirational to me. I know it’s not going to change their life, but it’s proof to them that they are making sense – to me, at least. (And it is reassuring to know that we are making sense to others).

And it’s going to get their oxytocin levels going! Dr Love – aka Paul Zak (can I change my name?) has researched the “moral molecule”, the chemical in the blood called oxytocin. It turns out that “being treated decently causes people’s oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly. And it’s not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as “the cuddle hormone”: for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab”.

So, let’s hear it for the male voles, and for social networking. Zak recommends, according to Oliver Burkeman writing in the Guardian

we should all be doing more to boost oxytocin in benign ways. He recommends a minimum of eight hugs a day (pets count, too); massage and even soppy movies seem to work: he has done the blood tests. Interactions on Twitter and Facebook seem to lead to oxytocin spikes, offering a powerful retort to the argument that social media is killing real human interaction: in hormonal terms, it appears, the body processes it as an entirely real kind of interaction

Get pressing that like button! William James claimed that “the deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated”, and a Harvard psychologist speaks of the importance of having a praise-criticism ratio of at least 5:1. Does anyone ever complain that they are praised too much?

Award ceremonies contain suspense, appreciation and thanks. Awards are prized and hard to come by – when we think of the Oscars, Olympics and such like. But there are everyday awards that are not so hard to come by, but are equally prized and create community. I had my own New Year ceremony which you can read about here. But there are awards to be made in our everyday world. These awards are not made with fanfares or fine words, but may consist of a “thank you” or simply a smile.

I’m not going to think too hard about the awards I am going to make today, but among them are my nominations for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award. (I am only including blogs which have recent posts).

And the nominations are (in no particular order and chosen from those who post regularly):

  1. Spirit 21 – Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
  2. Inspired Beeing – Cat Jaffee
  3. The Painted Prayerbook – jan Richardson
  4. Growing up with God – Rachael Elizabeth
  5. Simon Marsh
  6. shinystuff – Jan Dean
  7. Beyond the Edge – Viv McWaters
  8. Another Angle – Stephen Cherry
  9. Lost in the North – Dave Mock
  10. Plaza – Oliver Herbert
  11. People Reading
  12. Do not dance UK – Jose Campos
  13.  On the plus side – Lynn Walsh
  14. Christopher Burkett
  15. The Six Doyles – Katherine Doyle

The rules for accepting the nominations are:

  1. Link back to the person who nominated you
  2. Post the award image to your page
  3. Tell seven facts about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 other blogs
  5. Let them know they are nominated

So here’s the award

And here are seven facts about myself:

  1. I’m part of a lovely family – Jeanette, Adam, Oliver and Leo and their loved ones
  2. I was ordained in Sheffield in 1974
  3. I am still listening to Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon after all these years
  4. I love the beach – Patara and the beaches of Wirral and North Wales
  5. I’m intrigued by ideas of leadership and ministry (nominating here Dee Hock and Meg Wheatley for Very Inspiring Author awards).
  6. I follow the ups and downs of the Foxes – Leicester City – my home town team
  7. I recommended a book by Jay Griffiths to someone yesterday – A Sideways Look at Time

Thank you Ivon for nominating me and for inspiring me to today’s awards and community building. You would have been on that list.

Where are you heading?

David Herbert1 Comment

red bricks wall
It’s a week for appreciating leadership and for scrutinising leadership. Roy Hodgson’s leadership will be under scrutiny as England’s campaign in Euro ’12 begins, and nation and Commonwealth have been jubilating in appreciation of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Leaders often make the mistake of thinking that they know what is good for those who are their followers. Parents trying to get children to do homework often meet their own French resistance. Congregational leaders trying to introduce change “because it’s good for them” often feel like they are banging their head against a brick wall. The response to resistance is to try even harder and be rewarded with even greater frustration. For Edwin Friedman, in Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, “In such situations, the motivators function as though their followers did not know what was good for them, and, furthermore, would never change were it not for their efforts.”

Traditional models of leadership focus on individualism on a continuum of charisma/concensus. None of these models can effectively combat resistace and inertia, according to Friedman. He suggests that a family systems approach which focuses on the organic nature of the leadership/follower relationship as constituent parts of the same organism is far more effective. “The family approach to leadership, precisely because it is systemic, offers a more effective, less enervating, way of dealing with such resistance to change because it considers the paradoxes of resistance not as something blocking efective leadership, but, as part and parcel of the leadership process itself.” (p.225)

Friedman emphasises the importance of position. “If a leader will take prime responsibility for his or her own position as “head” and work to define his or her own goals and self, while staying in touch with the rest of the organism, there is a ore than reasonable chance that the body will follow.” (p.229) “It is in the capacity of the leader to maintain a position and still stay in touch that the organism’s potential growth resides.”

What Friedman is here saying about “self-differentiation” is a reminder of Dee Hock’s advice that we should invest our time in self care and managing “up” rather than “down”.  Hock suggests that we should spend 50% of our time managing ourselves and 25% on managing those who have authority over us. Instead of concentrating on the functioning of others, the “self-differentiating” leader’s focus is their own functioning.

For Friedman, the effects of dependency are reversed when the leader is concentrating on where we are “headed”. “It is the leader who now becomes the resistant one as he or she, instead of having to work to change others, now works to resist their (the followers) efforts to change him or her back.”

Photo by Ezioman.

And the award for the best …. is

David Herbert2 Comments
Occupy London

Now is the time of many retrospectives including Charlie Booker’s Words of the Year 2011. I imagine the awards being announced. Best newcomer: “Merkozy”, with the word trailing its expensive gown onto the stage to accept the award and thanking their producers, the euro crisis, and all those who have used the word. Word of the Year is, apparently, “OCCUPY”. Many of us would agree with that, and with the accompanying nomination of Giles Fraser for the Twurch of England’s Priest of the Year. Mercifully there is no award ceremony. Imagine trying to get Occupy off the stage.

Janine caters for all tastes at
Hollymere

 We have our own Herbert Awards, which reflect a local viewpoint. Community of the Year is awarded to Hollymere for developing a community of care and promoting independent living for those who would otherwise be heavily dependant and cut off from others. Hollymere represents a new design for living for older people, with its own “high street” open to the wider community, community rooms, restaurant and gym. Designers, carers and residents should come to the stage together to receive this award.Our prize for Butcher of our world doesn’t go to some toppled tyrant, but to our local butchers, Drury’s, who bring life, custom, humour and service (as well as some quality fresh food) to our local parade of shops.

In the sports category, Andy Murray has provided many moments when it has been hard to tear ourselves away from the set (!). There is only one team ever up for nomination: Leicester City. This year the only prize they win is Most Disappointing.

Our Concert of the Year was Paul Simon at the Manchester Apollo, though Take That take it for Extravaganza of the Year. Earworm is a word that took my fancy this year, and although I have been introduced to some good new (to me) music, such as Noah and the Whale, John Martyn, P J Harvey, the Earworm Prize goes to Fleet Foxes‘ Helplessness Blues.

Nominations for Film of the Year are disappointingly few. Once again we failed to deliver on our intention to get out more, which for us means going to the cinema. Yet we have seen some outstanding films, including The King’s Speech, Black Swan, The Inbetweeners, We Need to Talk about Kevin, Hugo and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For us there wasn’t anything to choose between them. We enjoyed them all, though not sure enjoyment is the word to use in relation to Kevin.

dunnock's nestWhile everyone was watching Arab Springwatch, we had our own springwatch, which began with the discovery of a dunnock’s nest in the back garden, and then a robin’s nest in the bush at the front of the house. We kept an eye on the hatchlings and fledglings and felt personally responsible when they flew their nests (on the same day).

Theological Find of the Year is awarded to Paula Gooder for sharing her research findings that ancient Hebrew cosmology shows a longstanding theological enterprise to bring God down to earth, and to Ivan Illich and his conspiracy “theory”.

Ginger posing for photoMost Creative Moment was putting together a series of photos for Ginger’s Day Out (in Llandudno) for children at Christ Church School, Ellesmere Port. There’s a book inside everyone – or, so they say. I think I’ve found mine!

Blogging Moment of the Year was getting feedback from Vic Goddard, Headteacher of Passmores Academy, the school featured in Channel 4’s Educating Essex for a post I wrote in response to that series.

There are joint winners of the prize for Most Helpful Intervention in my Thinking about Leadership. Heather Gold helped me to understand the importance of giving in her instructions how to be a tummler. Meg Wheatley is helping me to understand that we have to change our mind about leadership and organisation. Dee Hock led me to her, and also wrote of what he learned about organisation and leadership from the ground beneath his feet:

Billions upon billions of self-organising interactions are occurring second by second in the square yard of soil, each inter-connecing, relating, creating,and shaping self and others. Every particle is inseparable interacting and relating to others, and they still to others, unto the remote reaches of the universe and beyond – beyond knowing – but not beyond awareness, respect and love. The mystery of it all is overwhelmingly beautiful. Birth of the Chaordic Age. page 288.

IMG_0019Comedy of the Year goes to Rhod Gilbert for his routine about the tooth brush. There were many other contenders.

I am going to give my Mum the Lifetime Achievement Award. You have to be frail to qualify for lifetime achievement awards. She is now frail enough and now is more naturally retrospective. I have been surprised by some of the things she has got up to. For example, going into her city centre on her own at 3 in the morning to look for someone addicted to heroin on behalf of her worried parents (and finding her). She has also helped me understand that the delivery of a child isn’t a once in a lifetime event, but a lifetime’s work.

Time for new stories

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We have lost our local, communal stories and destroyed the places for their telling. Nor do we have a new compelling global story or communal places for its telling. The stories now endlessly drummed into us are not our stories. The are the stories those with escalating power and wealth tell to one another. Stories that incessantly pour into us through commercialisation of media and every other aspect of life. They are stories designed to arouse greed in the many to satisfy it in the few. They are stories that appeal to the worst, not the best in us. They are false stories. Deep inside, we no longer believe them. Neither do those who tell them, if the truth be known.

Dee Hock, 1999, Birth of the chaordic age, p.298f

Nothing but an idea

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Any organisation … is nothing but an idea. All institutions are no more than a mental construct to which people are drawn in pursuit of common purpose; a conceptual embodiment of a very old, very powerful idea called community. All organisations can be no more than the moving force of the mind, heart and spirit of people, without which all assets are just so much inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable matter, by the law of entropy steadily decaying to a stable state.

Dee Hock, 1999. Birth of the chaordic age, p.119