Personal archaeology

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Remember I wrote a letter from six months in the future? It was addressed to Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, and of course, myself.

In the letter I described a version of myself I’m inventing during these six months: self as a conduit for expression and creativity to pour through, just as the famous cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre, with whom Ben played Schubert, was a conduit for music.

He tells this story of her.

When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”

“Even at six,” Ben notes, “Jackie was a conduit for music to pour through.”

***

A week or so after I wrote the letter I came across an old photo of myself. That’s it above. I think I must be about three years old.

Looking at it, I’m struck by my freedom and delight. I have the same joy Ben describes in Jackie at age six, and it’s the exact expression of self I was groping towards in my letter.

So I see this new self I’m inventing is a revealing or reclamation of a previous self.

***

When I found this photo I looked more closely at other photos that were lying around from when I was about ten years old.

These are a whole other matter.

In photo after photo, the freedom and delight has been replaced by something else, something cautious and watchful.

I’ve previously mentioned the fact of the ruthless conditioning girls receive. It was the subject of the “Beyond Wanting to be Wanted” series. It’s a conditioning that suppresses and seeks to obliterate what a girl feels, what a girl thinks, what she looks like, her very being. It colonises her soul.

Now this is not a matter of blame. I’m not blaming my parents or my society or my culture. My parents loved me dearly and always wanted the best for me.

It’s just the way it was, the way it probably still is.

And by acknowledging that I also had a choice in the matter – the choice of not submitting, of rejecting the conditioning, of keeping my soul alight – I’m not blaming myself either. I was a child, dependent on my parents and my society, and I didn’t even see the possibility anyway.

No, I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in reclaiming that earlier free and delighted self, that unabashed, untrammelled young girl and letting her roam.

It’s her time again.

Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.*

***

* Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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Leaders! We want you

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This is a call for people to participate in a new book project. The book is part of The Leadership Project, started in October, 2011.

We want interview subjects, people who have views about leaders and leadership.

The views may be gleaned from your own practice as a leader, or they may be views about other people being leaders.

Perhaps you’ve been touched, moved or inspired by someone being a leader.

Perhaps you’ve been being a leader in a way that’s had others touched, moved or inspired.

We want to talk to you.

How does it work?

If you’re in the US or UK or somewhere other than Melbourne, Australia, interviews will be conducted by phone. Interviews take about an hour.

If your views are referenced or quoted in the book you will have the opportunity to review the draft text.

To arrange an interview time, contact me at solidgoldcreativity@gmail.com

Happy leading!

***

Who is a leader? Post-mortem on a definition

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I’ve been attempting to define what I mean by a “leader”. I’ve been doing so under the provocation of a book called Leadership for the Twentieth First Century by Joseph C. Rost, a man outraged that the majority of people writing and thinking about leaders and leadership do not attempt to define their topic.

Well, Mr Rost, I’ve attempted it, so count me in.

What have I concluded about defining a leader?

1. Being in the enquiry is what counts

The definition doesn’t matter as much as the trip one takes to get to a definition. Being in the enquiry is what counts, not the answer.

2. Leaders matter to me

The most important distinction is the distinction between leaders and leadership that was preliminary to the definition. I’ve discovered I’m more interested in being people leaders than in this thing called leadership, and I suspect it’s people being leaders we need more of, not leadership per se.

3. Leaving responsibility implied

I’m happy to leave the question of responsibility implied. Many people would say that taking responsibility is the mark of someone being a leader. I heartily agree, but I want to leave the act of taking responsibility implied within all five points.

We could say that responsibility is a condition of possibility for a person being a leader; ie, no responsibility = no leader.

4. To do or not to do morality?

The big question is one we’ve been tripping over a little: what to do with the question of morality or ethics?

I’ve chosen to leave it out, mainly because I see it as part of the evaluation of a leader. I’m interested in something prior to this: what it means to be a leader. I’m not interested for the moment in what it means to be a good leader.

5. Integrity

I’m still umming and ahhing about what to do with the question of integrity. By integrity I mean the wholeness and soundness of a person as given by the practice of honouring one’s word; I don’t mean something to do with morals or ethics, right and wrong, and so on.

Here’s the practice, a little simplified:

Honouring your word … means you either keep your word, or as soon as you know that you will not, you say that you will not be keeping your word to those who were counting on your word and clean up any mess you caused by not keeping your word. By “keeping your word” we mean doing what you said you would do and by the time you said you would do it.*

On the one hand, we could say integrity is another condition of possibility for a person being a leader; no integrity = no leader. On the other hand, integrity is fundamental to every person, regardless of their being a leader or not.

For now, I’ve chosen to leave it out of the definition because including it might imply it’s only required for leaders.

***

* Integrity: A positive model that incorporates the normative phenomena of morality, ethics, and legality – Abridged by Werner H Erhard, Michael C Jensen and Steve Zaffron. To read the paper, click here. It is a 30-page abridged version of the full 100+ page paper I’ve previously linked to.

Image: The Hare, 1927, Joan Miró

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Who is a leader? More implications

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Now, where were we with the definition of a leader?

So far I’m not convinced that attempting a definition is worth the candle, whatever Joseph C Rost may have to say about people looking at leadership who don’t define their topic. Still, post-mortems later.

We’ve covered the implications of points 1 and 2 of the definition in a previous post. This post, the implications of points 3, 4 and 5.

3. A leader sets out, or intends, to make change. A leader may or may not be successful in having the change occur. If the change does not occur, the leader is still a leader.

4. A leader takes on the risk of setting out to make change. A leader’s stance is “I’m willing to be blamed, criticised, attacked, ridiculed or worse if things don’t work out.”

5. A leader faces off the “tyranny of fear” and offers possibility in its place.

3. A leader sets out, or intends, to make change.

The leader intends change. He may or may not succeed in having the change come to pass. What counts is the intention, not the outcome.

The sooner we decouple the idea of “leader” from the ideas of “success” or “outcome”, the better. For one, we’d have more people willing to step up to being a leader. In addition, we’d have to become a certain way to allow people to do their best and not shoot them down when they didn’t pull something off.

We’d have to grow up at last and stop waiting for Santa Claus. Or Godot.

Now, to this word “change” …

In his definition of leadership, Rost qualifies it with the word “real”, which he says means, “substantive and transforming”. This doesn’t work for me for three reasons:

  • once you introduce an adjective or other qualifier into a definition, you’re lost; it’s time to go back to the drawing board
  • I explicitly reject the criterion of degree in my idea of a leader; people can be a leader in small matters or large
  • part of what happens when someone is being a leader is that the unexpected starts to show up; unforeseen, even undreamt-of results start to occur. It’s this magic proliferation – a doing without doing – which is the surest marker of someone operating as a leader. So if you have to know a change is “real” or “substantive or transforming” at the outset, as in Rost’s definition, the magic dimension of the unforeseen is ruled out.

What I mean by change is novelty, as distinct from, say, change as reaction. I mean something new to the situation, new factors, new options.

4. A leader takes on the risk of setting out to make change.

More than half the people I’ve interviewed to date for my book have said being a leader is tough. They’ve talked about blame and criticism, and the fear of it, and they’ve talked about the lack of support, the loneliness. As one interviewee put it,

People are happy enough for you to get out of your comfort zone, but when it comes to them … people vanish.

As Seth Godin says in Tribes,

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

That’s it. Being willing to feel discomfort – even most of the time – is one of the requirements of being a leader.

5. A leader faces off the “tyranny of fear” and offers possibility in its place.

A person being a leader does not create or contribute to conversations that rehearse fear.

You know the ones. Conversations about imminent disaster, imminent catastrophe, imminent shortage; conversations which have the shape and content of the “downward spiral”, as Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander describe it in The Art of Possibility.

Instead, a person being a leader creates conversations about possibility.

This new leader carries the distinction that it is the framework of fear and scarcity … which promotes divisions between people. He asserts that we can create the conditions for the emergence of anything that is missing … This leader calls upon our passion rather than our fear. She is the relentless architect of the possibility that human beings can be.

***

Image: The Gold of the Azure, Joan Miró

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The Liebster Blog Award

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I’ve just received a Liebster Blog Award from Mrs Daffodil of The Painting Gardener. Mrs Daffodil is a talented artist of great warmth and thoughtfulness. Plus, she has the world’s most smile-inducing username!

“Liebster”, to quote Mrs Daffodil, “is a German word, meaning dearest or beloved, but it can also mean favourite. The Liebster Blog is to be given to bloggers who have less than 200 followers in order to spotlight these wonderful blogs.”

Rules for giving the award

These are the rules:

  1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you (thank you, Mrs Daffodil!)
  2. Reveal the five blogs you have chosen and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog
  3. Copy and paste the award onto your blog (see above)
  4. Request the people you have chosen to receive the award pass it on to their favourite bloggers.

Mrs Daffodil’s other award-winners

The other four bloggers to whom Mrs Daffodil has given her award are (I’ve subscribed to some already):

My award-winners

The bloggers to whom I’m giving this award are (in random order):

Thomas Stazyk: A leader in the world AND exquisitely house-trained … where’s that cloning machine?; made a big difference to me in a time of grief

Notes from around the block: A woman hitting her stride and keeping it real in the face of the slings and arrows from those who haven’t yet tasted freedom

Hansi’s Hallucinations: World’s favourite Probation Officer and Hallucinator; plus, all you’ve ever wanted to know about the birds and bees but were too afraid to ask

Totsymae: A woman working it, even with a booger in her nose; also, an artist of power and superb colour sense. And I jus love it when she talks Southern to me

Exuvia: Makes a difference whenever she/he alights on your page. A blessing.

Enjoy!

***

Who is a leader? Implications of the definition

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Following are some implications flowing from the five points I used to define a leader, together with a few starting remarks.

Being a leader vs Leadership

The five points I raised in yesterday’s post relate to being a leader; they do not relate to leadership per se. There are a few reasons:

  • I’ve just finished Joseph C Rost’s Leadership for the Twenty-First Century and I’m taking his point that the terms “leader” and “leadership” are often conflated
  • at present, I’m more interested in people being leaders than in leadership
  • talking about people being leaders is easier and more productive than talking about leadership; once we human beings start talking about concepts rather than people, the concepts have a way of becoming progressively fixed and abstract. Think “justice”, for example, or “freedom” or “socialism.” This applies even where the concept is defined as a process or relation, as Rost and others have it.

Being a leader doesn’t require others

Yes, it’s counter-intuitive, and lots of leadership people will baulk and think I’m a nutter, but I cannot see that the definition of being a leader requires others.

Most often, other people will be involved. However, there’s nothing in being a leader, as I’ve defined it, that makes other people essential. One can be being a leader on a deserted island with only an old boot for company.

In other words, followers are not essential to being a leader. When it comes to leadership it may be a different matter, and that’s a topic for another day.

The five points and their implications

1. A leader is someone choosing to be a leader at this moment and in this situation.

A person may be being a leader in one situation, and not a leader in another situation. For example, a person may be being a leader in a community project such as a campaign to build a local bike path, or a project to secure employment for long-term unemployed people, while not being a leader in her friendship group or her Rotary club or job. In the following month, she may take on being a leader amongst her friends or at work, and have someone else be a leader in the bike path campaign.

Being a leader is a proposition, a malleable, changing proposition.

2. A leader is given by that choice, and not by other people and their choices. In other words, a leader is a leader by virtue of his own choice or declaration.

A person is being a leader because he is choosing being a leader. Being a leader is not given by some quality or characteristic dispensed at birth. Or by training. Or by reading “how to become a leader” books and blog posts.

Being a leader is given by a choice. Moreover, it’s a choice made by the person being a leader; it’s not a matter of being “anointed” a leader.

For example, say the CEO asks you to become the Program Director on the project to develop a new type of credit card and you say “yes”. It can look as if the choice for you to be a leader was the CEO’s.

Not so. For at least two reasons:

  • you said “yes”; until you gave an answer it wasn’t a choice, it was an offer
  • every day, you still have to get up and go to work and make something happen; every day, every moment, it’s you who is making the choice to be a leader.

Consider something else. Say a colleague, M, is hired as one of 10 business analysts on the credit card project. M too might choose to be a leader. For example, M might start talking to his colleagues and you, the Program Director, about using a new method of developing a prototype he’s seen work well elsewhere. No-one asked M to investigate a new method. M just chose to do so, to be a leader on the project.

… to be continued

Next post: More implications

Image: The flight of the dragonfly in front of the sun, Joan Miró, 1968

***

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Who is a leader? A Manifesto

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This is where I’m at in my thinking about what it means to be a leader. I’ve boiled it down to five statements, each of which is essential.

  1. A leader is someone choosing to be a leader at this moment and in this situation.
  2. A leader is given by that choice, and not by other people and their choices. In other words, a leader is a leader by virtue of his own choice or declaration.
  3. A leader sets out, or intends, to make change. A leader may or may not be successful in having the change occur. If the change does not occur, the leader is still a leader.
  4. A leader takes on the risk of setting out to make change. A leader’s stance is “I’m willing to be blamed, criticised, attacked, ridiculed or worse if things don’t work out.”
  5. A leader faces off the “tyranny of fear”* and offers possibility in its place.

Simple, isn’t it?

Next post, some implications.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility

Image: Siesta, Joan Miró, 1925

Possibility: Part 6

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This is the final part of the series on possibility and The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

I can’t take my leave of this glorious book without discussing what Roz and Ben call the practice of  “Giving an A”.  The practice was born when Ben, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, was about to start a new 2-semester course teaching 30 graduate students at the New England Conversatory of Music.

After 25 years of teaching Ben realised he was about to start another class with the same old obstacle in the way: that the students would be in such

a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance that they would be reluctant to take risks with their playing.

This time he did something different. He sat down with Roz, a therapist, and together they speculated about how they could move the students from the world of measurement – the world of right, wrong, good, bad, better than, less than, success, failure – into the world of possibility.

Ben describes what they came up with. “Roz and I predicted that abolishing grades altogether would only make matters worse … The students would feel cheated of the opportunity for stardom and would still be focused on their place in the lineup. So we came up with the idea of giving them all the only grade that would put them at ease”; the only grade that could “finesse the stranglehold of judgement that grades have over our consciousness from our earliest days.”

He announced it to the students as follows:

Each student in this class will get an A for the course. However, there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade: sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with the words, ‘Dear Mr Zander, I got my A because … ‘, and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade …

In writing their letters Ben tells them to “place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired … I am especially interested in the person you will have become by next May.”

The practice is a dramatic success, and not just with the students giving themselves an A. Because in exploring the idea Ben and Roz see it can be used in many different ways, including giving an A to others. There is so much more to say about the power and magic of the practice, and I could go on for posts and posts. For now, I want to end by including the letters written by two of Ben’s students and my own letter to Ben, from six months in the future.

***

Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because … I changed from someone who was scared to make a mistake in case she was noticed to someone who knows that she has a contribution to make to other people, musically and personally … Thus all diffidence and lack of belief in myself are gone. So too is the belief that I only exist as a reflection in other people’s eyes and the resulting desire to please everyone … I have changed from desiring inconsequentiality and anonymity to accepting the joy that comes from knowing that my music changes the world.

Giselle Hillyer

***

Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because I became a great gardener to build my own garden of life. Till last year I was intimidated, judgemental, negative, lonely, lost, no energy to do what-so-ever, loveless, spiritless, hopeless, emotionless … endless. What I thought so miserably was actually what really made me to become what I am today, who loves myself, therefore music, life, people, my work, and even miseries. I love my weeds as much as my unblossomed roses. I can’t wait for tomorrow because I’m in love with today, hard work, and reward … what can be better?

Sincerely, Soyan Kim

***

30 June 2012

Dear Ben,

I got my A because I gave my leadership project everything I had – my passion, my joy, my commitment – and I discovered I had so much more to give than I knew. I also finally discovered what you discovered: that people are always more important than the project or task I’m involved in.  What I love about the person I’ve become is that I broke through the limit on my creativity and expression that I’d often come up against, and which was one of the reasons I started my blog years ago. Now the limit is no longer there and I have become to expression what Jacqueline du Pre was to music, “a conduit for music to pour through”. As you say of her, I have the

radical confidence about [my] own highly personal expression that people acquire when they understand that performance is not about getting your act together, but about opening up to the energy of the audience and of the music, and letting it sing in your unique voice.

Yours in possibility,

Narelle Hanratty

***

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Possibility: Part 5

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A few days before Christmas I heard a British man speaking about his abhorrence of Christmas, and the lengths to which he goes to avoid it. This year he was spending the time in Australia;  last year, he’d gone to the Congo (of course, Australia, Congo … same diff).

He cited the hypocrisy of feeling, the consumerism, and so on. In short, he served up all the ready-to-hand “agreements” about Christmas in a two-minute burst of heat and fear.

What he left out, to my ears, was the source of the fear: that at Christmas we come face-to-face with the state of our relationships.

In the book The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, tells of a time he came face-to-face with the state of his relationships: when his second wife

walked away from the marriage midstream.

Luckily, his wife saw something he couldn’t quite see at first. He tells the story thus:

At the same time [as leaving] she asserted – though at first I did not listen – that we would always be in relationship, and that it was up to us to invent the form. Clearly the family had not been thriving under the arrangement we’d had. ‘Let’s invent a form,’ she said, ‘that allows us to contribute to each other, and let’s set a distance that allows us to be fully ourselves.’

Get that? At this late, late stage, she raises the possibility of something completely new.

He gets it.

Going down for the second time, I understood and grabbed hold. I saw the whole thing was made up and that the game of success was just that, a game. I realised I could invent another game.

The game he goes on to invent he calls “being a contribution”. What he means by that is a post for another day. For now, what matters is what each of them saw.

His wife saw that no matter if they were married or divorced they would always be in relationship. Moreover, her stance also implies something much broader: that all of us are always already in relationship. Whether we are married, divorced, or strangers to each other. We don’t have to establish or build a relationship: it’s already there. What we do, if anything, is call forth something already there.

Benjamin saw that something new was possible. Amid the pain and shock of the marriage breakdown new ways of relating and being presented themselves to him. He was not being given by his past or by his circumstances, he was being given by the future.

What both of them saw was that if the present form wasn’t working they could invent a form that did work.

***

Today I’m thinking about that British man, so full of hurt and fear, and hoping someone invites him into a new game. I may see him again, and if I do, I’ll invite him myself. What about you? What new games, what new forms, are you inventing for your relationships in the coming year?

***

Image: Engadin ski marathon, Switzerland by Valentin Flauraud/Reuters, courtesy of The Guardian

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What I learned about leadership this year

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What I learned about leadership this year is the power of acknowledgement.  I wrote about it previously, and this week I interviewed a leader who told me a splendid story about its impact in his life.

This man, J, had built a phenomenally successful movie distribution business from scratch. I heard about him from one of his former staff, a friend of mine, who always spoke about J with love and gratitude.

Intrigued by her attitude and the stories of what he provided to his staff, I requested an interview with him, and this week was lucky enough to meet him.

***

He told me a story about a man called G who had been his employee at a previous company. About a month ago, J and G had dinner together, something they had done once or twice a year since they worked together in the 80s.

At this dinner, G happened to mention he’d been carrying around a note J had written to him in 1983.

One day in that year, J was on his way out of the office when he asked G to get together a batch of videos and samples and put them on his desk so J could pick them up when he returned late at night. J duly returned to the office and saw the package waiting on his desk. J wrote a note to G and left it on G’s desk. The note said:

G, thanks mate. Exactly what I wanted. Well done. J

When G told him he’d carried this note around with him for 28 years, J asked why. G replied:

because it never happened before or since that a boss thanked me.

***

There is one other thing I learned about leadership this year, and that’s how wonderful it is to talk about it. Interviewing people in the last few weeks has been a real joy. To talk to people who are being leaders in the world, and to talk to them about something they’ve thought deeply about, is a privilege. I cannot think of anything I’d rather be doing.

To everyone who has read or commented on this blog during the year, my very best wishes for Christmas to you and your family. May you enjoy a time of love and peace and renewal.

***

Image: Michael Leunig