Blind Spot, Part 2

Consider that your blind spot is where you operate from right now. This is a habitual way of seeing, thinking, acting, talking, sensing, relating, etc. It is invisible to you, hence the name "blind spot". Can you see why? How's your idea of yourself in relation to how other people see you? Can you ever actually truly see yourself? If you're in a car, you can see outside the car...but can you see the outside of the car? You can see other people in their cars. You can see the inside of your car, but how can you actually see yourself inside the car without having some sort of out of body experience? Your blind spot of leadership is the same, though obviously slightly more figurative. You can't see your blind spot cause you're in it. Similar to wearing rose colored glasses that make everything rose colored, your life is colored by your blind spot. Everything that is possible to you is determined by your blind spot. Your options are limited by it and your decisions will be made within the context of your blind spot. Scharmer:

"When we realize that our habitual way of seeing and acting is not getting us anywhere, we have to redirect and bend our beam of our (individual or collective) attention and redirect the edges of perception back upon its source, back upon the one who is performing the activity. When this shift happens, we begin to attend to the situation from a different place. The field structure of attention describes the realm between the visible world (what we see) as it meets the invisible world (the source or place from which we perceive it). When we change the way we attend, a different world is going to come forth." (pg 113)



This is a long video, but watch the first 12-15 minutes...do you recognize any blind spots? What about the blind spot of the woman he talks about offering money to? (around minute 14). If you want to see other videos about Grameen Bank, see this site: http://fora.tv/2008/01/17/Muhammad_Yunus_Creating_a_World_Without_Poverty#chapter_05.

"Whether you are a great leader, educator, artist, athlete, physician, writer, or coach, whether you work alone or belong to a team or organization, you cross the threshold by transforming the structure of your attention...The Indo-European root of the word “lead” and “leadership,” *leith, means “to go forth,” “to cross the threshold,” or “to die.” Sometimes letting go feels like dying. But what we’ve learned about the deeper process of the U is that something has to change—a threshold must be crossed—before something new can come. The journey ahead of us entails uncovering and deciphering the principles and practices of that fundamental process so they can serve as a language that will help to illuminate the invisible leadership realm of the blind spot." (pg 113)

We hope to address part of this journey today in class. Thanks for joining us on this journey!

Your seeing

Contrary to wide belief, I do not think that a leader's primary job is to create a vision, goals and direction. The primary job of leadership...is to enhance the individual and systemic capacity to see, to deeply attend to the reality that people face and enact.

Scharmer says that moving from downloading to seeing is simple, but not many of us desire the simplicity of burning our houses down.  It is common to expect leaders to have answers, but perhaps there is more leading to be done with questions.  What is the most important goal of our committee, organization, society? What is the personal story that brings you to the group at this time?  What can I learn from you?

I am reminded that human vision actually "sees" images upside down and our brains then invert the image.  Sometimes the best question is the one that turns everything upside down.

Your listening

We will consider the importance of listening on Wednesday, so wanted to give you a broader idea of Scharmer's thoughts on listening and leadership.

As Scott pointed out further down this page, voices of judgment, cynicism, and fear are with us constantly. How does this affect your listening? How does your listening relate to ethics, or does it at all?

Consider how you listen to people. How do you listen to your friends and family? Is your listening the same for people you don't know? Is your listening the same for people you get along with as for people you don't? Is it the same for people you think don't like you as for people who do? Is your listening the same for your managers as it is for your subordinates? What affect does this have on your conversations/relationships/interactions with people?

Finally, what about other people's listening? Can you be responsible for how people listen to you? If it's possible, how?

Gateways

It’s common to say that trees come from seeds.  But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree.  These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows.  But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth.  In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

--Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers

Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future

Reflections, the SOL Journal on Knowledge,

Learning, and Change, Vol. 5, No. 7, 2004.

Now that you've emerged from the food coma of Thanksgiving, you may be wondering if there is (depending on your generation) a Reader's Digest, CliffNotes or SparkNotes version of Scharmer's book. You are in luck! The Presencing Institute has a two page version of the basic concepts posted here.

Image:  Torii at Shrine on Mount Hakone, Japan.  R. Manley/Shostal Associates for brittanica.com.

The business of benevolence

Katherine Fulton is president of Monitor Institute.  Monitor Institute’s mission is to help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems.  In this presentation she has completely integrated Theory U into her discussion of the philanthropy that wants to emerge from our collective future.

Suspending Judgment

In last week’s class on Kegan and Lacey’s Immunity to Change, I noticed a thread through the comments during the multi-column exercise.  People were reluctant to share what they would like to change about themselves.  And even more reluctant to reveal the underlying motivations that were working against a change they really wanted.  I have a deeper respect for Adam for his willingness to be essentially defenseless with us for a few minutes.

Scharmer talks about the resistance to change and how we need to quiet three inner voices: the voice of judgment that keeps us from seeing things as they are; the voice of cynicism that makes us protect our emotions from others; and the voice of voice of fear that tells us to dread giving up our familiar sense of ourselves. 

Ah, but how to do that, especially in the heat of the moment?  Allyn Bradford suggests some practical ways to still these voices here.

Blind Spots, Part 1

What are your blind spots? How can you know what you don't know?

First, let's open up the discussion. This video was taken from the presencing.com website. Watch the video, then consider areas in your life where you struggle with the tension between immediate challenges and institutionalized systems.

One could argue that immediate challenges are results of institutionalized systems. As Scharmer puts it, we are "collectively creating results that nobody wants." This is because one of our biggest blind spots, one of the things we have to get most aware of, is our existence within, our contribution to, our own personal identity with and ownership of each system that is producing those results. Essentially, we are the system. As we become more aware of this we can begin a natural process of following the U, "creating the future that wants to emerge". And as Peter Block may have put it, creating a future that is distinct from the past. However, if that future exists in our blind spot, the possibility of that future does not exist for us. So, how do we recognize those blind spots? Could you ever be completely open, with no blind spots at all?

Jumping ahead of the story

I had intended to pull some quotes from the introduction as a sort of synposis, but we hope to have a real life problem to work on in class, so I wanted to outline what that might look like and ask for suggestions. Groups using Theory U as a framework are composed of people who can actually initiate and possibly implement a change. So, what can a group so Evans students do? One issue that has come up repeatedly in more general discussions is textbooks and whether their utility in a course justifies the expense involved in buying the required latest edition. Certainly students can vote with a mouse and refuse to register for a course that requires $300 in texts. More dramatically, a registered section could collectively refuse to purchase the text. It introduces another area of shared governance of the University. To seriously explore such an issue, we would need others -- such as the manager of the UW Bookstore, a representative from the Evans School, and possibly from the Faculty Senate. Suddenly, what started as a gripe session starts to get complicated and political and seem like a lot of work. And you/I/we thought this was going to be easy...after all, we have our strategic triangle and matrix all filled in.

Local quietude

From Depth Media
Deep Presence: Meditations on a Wild Coast is a series of digital tone poems pairing striking cinematography of the Alaskan wilderness with location sound, moving music and poetry. A departure from narrative and traditional nature films, Deep Presence opens the senses, calms the mind, and invites the kind of quiet noticing that reveals the natural world to everyone, wherever they may find themselves.

Where to start

Think of your closest relationships with family and significant others, friends and co-workers. Are those relationships an imposed framework over which you have no control or does your presence in the relationship actually modify and influence the framework?

What if we considered a large organization as if it were a single organism, or -- to extend the framework analogy -- as a set of interdependent relationships?  What would that mean when we joined that organization?  Could we claim that its culture, habits, vision and even aspirations do not, to some extent, become our own?  

Now, what if that large organization were an entire country or the entire world?

Over the next two weeks we hope to explore what that might mean and how we can "become the change we hope to see."