Ideals in Motion

I am my conversations (Part 2)

In one recent day I was on phone calls, IM exchanges and face to face conversations with individuals in Helsinki, Moscow, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Seattle, Istanbul and Portland. In a very real sense I was in each of those places within a time span of no more than an hour - I was truly in more than one place at the same time. This is only possible - me being in more than one place at the same time - if I don't think of myself as defined by my physical being or constrained by traditional understanding of time and space.

When I left the physical conversations I was having did "I" leave? I don't think so. Part of me remained with the other person as a conversational memory - perhaps even as an emotion experienced by the other party. Who am "I" then? For most of us our sense of self is, in large part, informed by and limited to what our physical senses tell us about who we are - I am my body, my feelings and my thoughts. These artifacts of self go with "me" wherever "I" go and where "I" am is where they are. But what if I thought of myself as moving through the world in another way. What if "I" occupied time and space in a different way? What would be my approach to inteacting with others if I thought of myself moving through the world as a conversation.

As a conversation I become the stories others have about me. I become the internal conversations they have about the meaning of my behaviors, my actions, my mood, my words and my spirit. I become the the internal conversation they feel about me. These conversations contain me and they are the raw building blocks used to co-create our futures together. How congruent are these "conversations that I am" with the ideals I hold as valuable? In the beginning there was the "word" and from the word conversations began that created what we have and who we are today.

Shooting our children should be a wake up call…

When a society loses connection with its ideals crazy and tragic events begin to occur. Fear can be seen as the root cause of losing connection with what matters in life. The recent shooting of 15 year old Christopher Penley in Longwood Florida is a case in point. This tragic event was the direct result of fear being the dominant emotion in much of our public discourse today. Fear permeates our conversations, is the staple of the Bush Administration’s pronouncements and decisions, and fuels the evening newscasts. As a people, we have become fearful of other nations, other religions, other lifestyles, the intent of our elected leaders and, it seems, even fearful of our children. We are fearful of globalization, declines in the stock market, bubbles bursting and our lives changing.

When fear replaces love, hope and appreciation all motion stops. Fear is a contracting emotion. Fear is the reason we lose connection with our ideals. Fear makes it oh so easy to lose our focus on what we say matters in our life. In the United States we founded a country on an ideal that espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have enshrined ideals spoken by leaders past – Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…” and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – as worthy of aspiration, worthy of sacrifice. Yet today we take the easy road. In a very real sense, for many people it is much easier to talk about our ideals than it is to live them. It's much easier to believe that those "in charge" will protect us. When we surrender our freedoms and our ideals to fear, when we abdicate our responsibility to do what it takes to live free of fear in an uncertain world, we have truly become immobile.

The challenge of sustainability…

Contrary to what most people think, sustainability is not about cracking some “code” in the hopes of continuing to replicate our success. Sustainability in practice is the process of developing the capacity to continuously start over. This is a fundamentally different way of approaching success in life.

For many, success is something we try to hold on to for as long as we can. This is a natural response and it is a response that insures failure. By holding on we keep feeding back into the system the things we think created the original success – the behaviors, the focus, the people, the goals and rewards. None of this will work because doing so presupposes that the success was achieved either despite of or because of a set of internal and external variables being in place. All we need to do is make sure the variables are accounted for in the same way as with the original attempt. In order to sustain success in this fashion none of the variables – internal or external – can change. And all of them must be known. Not a likely scenario.

Developing the capacity to continuously start over requires a very different kind of focus, it requires a different sensibility to what is going on in the system that supports and holds the elements contributing to success. This is the difficult part – understanding and appreciating that success occurs within a system of elements that are in relationship. In today’s businesses and organizations developing relational capacity is not usually focused on as an integral (I say critically essential) part of the business development strategy – let alone as part of a strategy for sustainable success. More often than not, business approaches its objectives by cataloging the various "parts" or elements of the system that are necessary to operate effectively and then works to assemble and direct them in the most optimal fashion with appropriate leadership and management functions. It's a Newtonian framework that focuses on building the most effective "machine" in a system with the most effective "parts". Sustainability requires a focus on relational capacity that is not just an appreciation and understanding of the nature of systems.

What is relational capacity? What is it that we need to focus on that enables our ability to continuously start over? These are the questions that the next few postings will answer.