The sexiest thing

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A little while ago, my coach on the book project, who’s also my coach on everything, got engaged to be married. I asked her who her fiancee was for her and this is what she said:

When I wake up in the morning I just know that ahead of me I’ll be laughing and having fun for most of the day. He’s someone I can absolutely rely on, he’s calm and laidback and complements my tendency to driven-ness, and he’s a great father [he has a young son from a previous relationship].

Wow! Is that not the description of the man every woman wants? As for that “someone I can absolutely rely on”, that idea of integrity, is that not the sexiest thing? For men and for women, even though we might not be used to thinking of it as an attraction, especially in the case of the latter.

***

Image: Another sexy thing: Harry Connick Jr, who popped up on Law and Order: SVU the other night. Finally, a man the match of Olivia.

Making strange

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When I first moved to Melbourne from Sydney 12 years ago, I heard a saying I’d never heard before. “NQR”, people would say with a wink, and the conversation would end.

“NQR?”, I asked one day.

“Yeh, you know, Not Quite Right.”

Turns out there was a bulk grocery store of the same name that sold food in damaged packaging. Cans with dents, sacks with tears, that kind of thing. And the name of the store had been adopted as the shorthand for communicating something was “off” with a particular individual. Sort of like saying “he’s a few sandwiches short of the picnic”, only without the effort.

“NQR?”, one would ask. “Yep”. Enough said.

***

If you’ve ever had any dealings in the professional craft sector you’ll know people talk a lot about what makes something art and what makes something craft. Usually, they end up rolling out a very old and tattered premise: that craft is about the useful and art is not.

It occurs to me now the real distinction lies in the “not quite right”. Making the “not quite right” is what all artists, consciously or unconsciously, are setting out to do.

This isn’t an original idea. It has a long provenance. The Russian formalist literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky first used the term “defamiliarisation” in 1917 to refer to the strivings of the poet, the painter, to make strange the familiar.

The European philosophers of the 20th century, people like Heidegger and Derrida, standing on the shoulders of people like Shklovsky, deliberately sought to extend and exploit language that was defamiliarised. If language could be made strange to us, they speculated, what new things might we glimpse outside its usual remit?

The idea extends all the way to the field of artifical intelligence and computer programming with the postulation of the “uncanny valley”, the small region of human perception lying on either side of a norm, which I’ve written about previously in relation to Michael Jackson. The not-quite-right of art is about creating in the uncanny valley, and the best art has happened upon the sweet spot in that place.

The best, the most successful art has an indisputable effect on us. There’s no gainsaying it. We’re hooked and mesmerised in front of it, and it has everything to do with the tension between the familiar and the strange.

***

Image: One of the famously disturbing works of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini; photo taken by me at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

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Context is decisive

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Rosamund Stone Zander* tells an anecdote about going on a skiing trip to improve her skiing. On the very first run her plans went awry.

I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.

She was having a miserable time and was about to abandon her project and come back another time “when real skiing was to be had” when it suddenly occurred to her she was operating under an assumption:

that real skiing is skiing on snow.

She saw immediately that if she were going to be “a New England skier”, she had better include ice in her definition of skiing.

Thereafter, she says, she “redrew the box” in her mind so now she had it that “skiing is skiing on snow and ice.” The next run, and all the runs after, were very different. Her physical self now “coordinated easily” with her new way of thinking and she “welcomed the ice.”

***

The box in her mind, and the one in ours, is our context. It’s essentially what we delineate as ours or “it”. Everything outside the box is not-ours or not-it. Dealing with the not-it of our lives is exhausting, futile and disempowering and yet we spend a lot of our lives doing precisely that. We regularly fail to get that we are the ones who drew the box and we can re-draw it at any time.

I used the distinction of context on a recent consulting engagement. Never the most patient person, I was getting frustrated at the glacial pace of the project. Tasks that would normally take hours were taking days, and whole weeks were going by with very little progress. No matter how I tried to hurry along my various colleagues and the client, nothing worked. And yet every time there was a hiatus I would stop earning income because it was a time and materials job.

At first I considered ending the engagement and walking away. Technically, I had fulfilled the terms of the contract because the contract end date had already past. In my heart, however, this wouldn’t have been honouring my word. I may have signed a contract formulated around time, but the unwritten clause, to which I’d also signed up, was that the job be finished.

As soon as I got that walking away was not an option, I saw what hadn’t been working and it had everything to do with my context.

The context I had had was that completing the project meant completing the project as quickly and smoothly as possible. In this context, the glitches, delays and misunderstandings were not “mine”, not “it”.

Yet say if I re-drew the box to include the glitches and delays and misunderstandings? Say if I invented a context that said completing the project meant completing the project in the face of glitches and delays and misunderstandings?

As soon as I got this new context, the frustration fell away. And, wouldn’t you know it, the project re-started almost immediately.

The glitches, delays and misunderstandings didn’t necessarily go away; what went away was my resistance to them.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility; this book just keeps on giving.

Image: Alpine skiing by Leroy Neiman

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On doctors and other divas

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It came up in the comments that doctors might have an implied dispensation from communicating with empathy to their patients. I think many people, not least many doctors, would hold this view.

It’s based on a number of unexamined assumptions.

1. Skill or service or efficiency is not concerned with empathy or relating.

2. Not only is skill or service or efficiency not concerned with empathy or relating, they are in contradistinction; more of one guarantees less of the other.

3. Empathy or relating is a “nice-to-have”; it’s the icing on top but makes no appreciable (read, measurable) difference in the execution of a skill or service, nor in the world generally.

There’s also a fourth underlying assumption which Seth Godin notes (how great is this guy? Posts seven days a week, produces potent little gems most):

4. Trapped in the “scarcity model” of thinking, we assume if someone is truly gifted they don’t have the “time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding our needs”. In short, a “diva” is great because she is a jerk.

All these types of assumptions are markers of the “scarcity model” of thinking, the conception of the world in which everything is finite. They are also markers of a conception of the world in which a fatuously mechanistic cause-and-effect operates.

It’s all nonsense, all a fundamental delusion about the world and the way it works, and people like Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell are illustrating it.

***

Professor Gittell is Professor of Management at Brandeis University in the US, and on a recent trip to Australia she shared her findings about the determinants of performance in the airline industry and hospital sector.

Professor Gittell looked at the organisations in each sector that performed well and those that performed less well, and distinguished three parameters as being vital to the performance differential:

  • shared goals
  • shared knowledge
  • mutual respect among workers.

So what? we might ask. We could all intuitively predict the presence of these factors, or factors like these, may lead to increased performance in an organisation.

Her findings are startling in showing the degree to which these factors make a difference. In fact, in the hospital setting, she finds these factors – factors which pertain to what’s happening outside the operating theatre – to be the greatest determinant of the effectiveness of the hospital, the satisfaction of staff and the patient outcome.

She has now shared her model of organisational performance which she calls “Relational Coordination” with many hospital systems around the world. And all over she meets with the same startlement, the same evidence of our delusion about the way the world works. As one UK surgeon, a little less invested in his amour propre, said to her:

It’s really hard to get it’s not what we’re doing in the operating theatre that determines the outcomes.

***

For more information about Professor Gittell, go to her website or to the Relational Coordination site.

New ears

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There’s a question I’ve been letting myself be used by this week:

Starting from nothing, what can I create?

If I were able to get outside what I know, outside what the past is telling me about who I am and what’s possible, what could I create?

Inside the question, I remembered someone.

***

Several years ago, a colleague and I were hired by a government department to provide recommendations on the technology it should purchase to assist staff members with a disability. During the engagement I met a staff member whom I call Iris.

Iris was born with a severe hearing impairment. She wore hearing aids and used lip-reading, and spoke with what she called a “deaf accent”. After I interviewed her, Iris invited me to go with her to a private appointment with her audiologist because she thought it would be a good opportunity for me to ask him questions. I went, and it was. Later, she asked me if I wanted a copy of something she’d sent her audiologist and I said yes.

It was a story she’d written about her life in hearing aids.

When she was a little girl, she wore a hearing aid powered by two batteries so large and heavy for a child they were supported by a halter that went round her neck. Each battery hung down on her chest, she said, like premature breasts.

At that time, children like Iris qualified for a government scheme which provided new hearing aids every five years or so. Iris was raised by her grandparents who were classical music aficionados, and every five years, they would take Iris to get her new hearing aids and Iris’s world would be turned upside down. Each new hearing aid would cancel out a whole swathe of her experience, while opening up new areas. On one changeover, she explained, she lost her grandmother’s favourite, Schubert, but she gained Chopin whom previously she could never hear.

At each changeover of hearing aid, she started from nothing all over again.

***

There are very few people I’ve ever met as confident and self-assured as Iris. And she was a leader. Normally, people hiring consultants seem to assume the consultant has some kind of magic power to see or understand what’s going on without giving them any information. Not Iris. She took responsibility for ensuring, as far as possible, I got some insight into what it takes to be deaf. She created opportunities to communicate with me and increase my knowledge outside the formal interview process, and she shared her life with me.

She totally got how she could contribute to me for everyone’s benefit, and she did it.

Today, I’m wondering how Iris’s experience of starting from zero every five years contributed to who she is in the world: a human being living the possibility of power, resourcefulness and leadership in the face of severe disability. And what she learnt of invention and nothingness.

***

Image: Poster by Raymond Savignac, 1978, courtesy Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

Conversational polka

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He was funny and theatrical and I was having a good time talking to him. Then I started to notice that every so often he would make a bid to lead the conversation into the “downward spiral“* and that his poison of choice was politics. What else?

When I noticed it, I decided I was not joining him. I felt too full of happiness that day to be taking no low road.

The first time it happened I mildly acknowledged one of his points, and he was satisfied. At least for a bit. Second time it happened, I offered nothing. Third time it happened I decided I had to enter the dance in earnest. I started a conversation for possibility instead and invited him into it.

At some level he registered the deviation, and was big-hearted enough to choose to follow my lead. He tried the old gambit once or twice more, but his heart wasn’t in it now, and each time I just invited him back into the conversation for possibility. We talked and laughed for hours, and both of us felt exhilarated when we said goodbye. As Homer S would say, we were “embiggened”.

***

In the past, I was a downward-spiral-talking addict. I would do whatever it took to get people to talk doom and gloom with me. I still remember the kind of voluptuous hunger I felt to participate in yet one more session, and the twinge of triumph I’d feel when the old familiar strains would start up.

Nowadays, it’s different. My default position is that I’m not engaging in such conversations. Some days, I forget and get caught up in it again, but most days I’m not going there.

The impact of the downward spiral conversation is vicious. It disempowers the direct participants, and through them, proliferates in the conversations of all the people they come in contact with. It kills the possibility of anything new. It makes us immensely boring to ourselves.

If someone starts a downward spiral conversation in your vicinity:

  • disengage by saying something like, “this topic makes me feel disempowered [or unhappy or demoralised, etc]; I’d like to talk about another topic”, or
  • start a conversation for possibility.

***

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

Image: Conversation by Piet Noest

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Resurrections

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“It’s a life of crucifixions and resurrections,” said the priest. “Of course,” I thought, “that’s what Easter means.”

***

Last weekend, my mother’s quilting club put on their bi-annual quilt show. It was held in a white art gallery overlooking a bay. The sun was out, the gardens just starting to turn gold.

They’d set up a table selling raffle tickets at the local shopping centre in the preceding weeks, and on the morning of the opening one of the club members talked about the show on a major Sydney radio station.They were overwhelmed with visitors, some who’d driven for hours. The gallery staff were caught off guard. Having advised the club they could not provide their own tea and cakes, the cafe was now overrun with quilters desperate for a cup. The queues persisted for hours.

My mother had several of her quilts on display, as well as three quilts for sale. So many were the quilts, they had room to hang only one of the quilts she had for sale; the others were merely draped over the nearest spare object.

She could have sold the quilt on display at least 10 times. She had people fighting over it, and scores of people asking her about the colour palette and technique. Afterwards, she had a phone conversation with the woman who bought it and the woman told her she had come to the quilt show with an academic in textiles who had described the quilt palette as outstanding.

It was the same story with the quilts that weren’t even hung. She had numerous offers for each. One woman, on learning someone else had just bought the quilt she wanted, asked my mother if she would take a commission to make another. In fact, my mother not only sold all the quilts many times over, she got several requests for commissions and offers for the quilts which weren’t for sale.

My mother and her quilts were the talk of the show.

***

My mother will turn 80 this year. For most of her life, she has considered herself shy, and she frequently suffered in social settings. She was often unhappy and frustrated. Then about 12 years ago she discovered quilting and her life has been transformed. She found something that satisfied her need for creative expression, for passion, for friendship and sociability, and since then everything’s been different.

My father died in July 2010 after being married to my mother for 51 years. The first nine months were awful, and I feared for her life too. Now I see she’s turned a corner. Another resurrection has occurred.

***

Image: The classic Roebuck quilt (not my mother’s version)

Choose your reason for being sacked

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Curious story in The Age yesterday* about a case before the Fair Work Ombudsman involving a young woman who was sacked from her job as a personal assistant for a real estate agent because she was “too short” and “looked too young”.

She had been in the job two weeks when she was dismissed. She had recently assisted at an auction by recording bids, and in a phone conversation one of the directors of the company told her her height:

could be a disadvantage at an auction where there was one or more interested parties and she would not have the presence to effectively negotiate.

Another director emailed her to say:

Some of the directors at the auction on Saturday were worried by your overall young look. This will be an ongoing concern.

The Ombudsman fined the company for breaching the Fair Work Act under which it is “unlawful to discriminate against employees on the grounds of, among other things, age.” The company was also ordered to make clear to all their staff that federal workplace laws had been contravened.

What’s so curious, you ask?

What’s curious is that it came out in questioning that the reason given to the employee for her dismissal was not the real reason. The real reason, a director of the company admitted, was that the director who fired her

felt a little awkward admitting that he had very little on to justify an assistant and incorrectly used [her] age.

What’s curious is that neither the journalist writing the story, nor the Ombudsman, made any comment about the lie and the fact an employee was made to feel physically inadequate rather than have a director of the company feel awkward. Instead, the journalist and the Ombudsman concerned themselves only with the ostensible reason for the sacking. Why?

Well, for starters there are no fines for lying or being a jerk. Pity.

***

* Clay Lucas, “Sacked worker too short and too young”, The Age, April 2, 2012

The feared communication

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So, I haven’t exhausted the topic of truth-telling yet. I’ve got something more to say.

A few years ago I took the series of courses known as the Curriculum for Living offered by Landmark Education. The first course in the series of three is the Landmark Forum; the second is a course known as the Advanced Course; the third is a course that stretches over 3-4 months which is called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program.

I’ve been a participant and a coach in the latter program, and there’s an exercise in the program that never fails to stun people. The exercise requires each participant, over the course of the program, to interview at least five people who are close to them. They can interview as many people as they like, but five is the suggested minimum.

The interview structure and set-up

The interview consists of five questions:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. What are my weaknesses?
  3. What can you count on me for?
  4. What can’t you count on me for?
  5. If you were speaking on behalf of the people who know me, how would you describe me?

Participants are carefully coached on preparing for the interviews. They are told when inviting someone for an interview, they are to make it absolutely clear that:

  • the interviewee is free to say whatever he or she wants to say
  • the interviewer is eager to have an absolutely truthful conversation
  • regardless of what the interviewee says, the interviewer will not react to, nor in any way, dispute their answer.

Participants are encouraged to invite their nearest and dearest, as well as their nearest and not-so-dearest, into an interview. People generally interview their husband or their wife, their siblings, their parents, their bosses, their friends, their work colleagues and so on.

Interviews can be conducted by phone, or face-to-face.

The outcome

As you’d expect, many people are terrified at the prospect of this exercise. Some put it off until the very end of the program, some don’t do it.

Most people, however, do take it on, and listening to them talk about it is an extraordinary experience. People who might not have said a word for the entire 3-4 months, stand up and talk about what their boss said to them, or what their wife or their brother said to them, and they are exhilarated. “I was expecting something really negative and it wasn’t at all! What a surprise!”, they usually say, their faces lit up, their whole body moving freely.

What’s happening here?

The relief is huge. But why relief? Because we spend our lives fearing a certain communication is about to come our way. You know the one I mean. That certain communication you think is designed just for you that you feel might very well kill you if you heard someone saying it to you.

So potent is the fear of receiving this communication, we design our lives to make sure no-one ever says it. For example, we enrol in endless courses and proudly insist on our teachability to ensure we never hear someone telling us we’re dogmatic or closed-minded, say.

When participants do the interview exercise, they discover without fail that the feared communication is not there. Interviewees inevitably say something quite different.

Multiple effects

The exercise generates multiple effects, not merely the relief of not hearing the feared communication.

It also uncovers any unfinished business between two people. Because participants quickly realise it’s impossible to invite a person for an interview, or in some cases, to complete the interview, unless the unfinished business is addressed. Suddenly, it’s there staring you in the face and you have a unique opportunity to resolve it.

By far the biggest impact of the exercise lies in experiencing oneself as someone who is not afraid of the truth, someone who can handle truth-telling. For this reason alone, the exercise is priceless.

***

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Too little said, too much communicated

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I’ve been thinking about this matter of lying that came up in the last post, and it occurred to me we operate under three assumptions when we’re considering whether to be truthful with others:

  1. Only what’s said counts
  2. The person to whom I’m talking is small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth
  3. No-one will know I haven’t been truthful if I just say nothing.

1. Only what’s said counts

We have it that we’re not communicating if we’re not speaking. Wrong. The unsaid is communicated, and the unsaid shouts louder than the said. Not only does the content of the unsaid shout, the fact of it does too. All of us are geniuses of the first order when it comes to knowing something is there, something is off. As the great US novelist, Anne Tyler, has one of her characters say of his family situation:

Too little said, too much communicated.

And saying something rather than nothing doesn’t change the equation one jot if the something is not the truth. Withholding the truth and giving a “white lie” instead is still a case of the unsaid. The fact of the lie, the fact of the withholding, registers. It registers in the speaker and in the other person and in the world.

The world is not merely the said; it is also the unsaid. The world is not merely the things; it is also the non-things. The world is not merely being; it is also not-being.

2. “They are small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth”

Only one thing to say here, and I’d suggest a mirror would come in handy. Who is small and fragile and not able to handle the truth?

All of us are large and able. Unexpected wonders occur when we give up our listening of others as small.

3. No-one will know if I haven’t been truthful

Wrong again. You’ll know.

***

Image: Photograph by George Roder

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