The Circle Project

What is The Circle Project?

Founded in 2005 by Patti Digh and David Robinson, The Circle Project helps individuals, organizations, and communities create new patterns, new stories, new cultures.

Are you living a circumstance-driven or intention-driven life?

This is one of the questions we grapple with during our six-month, 12-session telecoaching group, LiveNow! Our next group is starting on January 12th - we'd love for you to join in this journey.

FREE TELESEMINAR / Choice Points : Access and Handouts

Our free one-hour teleseminar (RECOGNIZING YOUR CHOICE POINTS) is today (Jan 7th) from 12-1pm Eastern / 9-10am Pacific.

To access the call, dial 712-432-0075 (access code 769142)

It will be important to access the handouts during the call. You can find them in PDF here.

If you haven't already signed up for the call and would like follow-up materials (including the recording of the class), you'll need to sign up below. Thanks!

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Free Teleseminar - "Recognize Your Choice Points"

Arrange whatever pieces come your way. -Virginia Woolf

We are always in choice. Always.

Regardless of the circumstance, we choose how we are in that circumstance. Which leads to new circumstances that are either reductive or expansive.

Even when we feel trapped, when we feel others hold our fate, when we feel compelled to begin our statements about our business or personal success or failure with words like, "In this economy..." Even in those moments, we are in choice.

Even the way we frame our "new year's resolutions" and business plans is a choice. Are they framed in negative intentions (I'll stop doing x) or in positive intentions (I will do x)?

Recognizing that we're always in choice means giving up the abdication of responsibility to others, to the economy, to mean managers or disease or bad genes. It means owning that even in those circumstances, we are fully in choice. I may not choose the circumstance, but I choose how I am in it. Always.

FREE TELESEMINAR

Thursday, January 7th
12-1pm Eastern / 9-10am Pacific

CHOICE POINTS: recognizing yourself into a more abundant, meaningful life

There are six choice points we need to recognize in order to live different patterns.

Life is made up of patterns that arise from our choices, most of them unconscious. A new year calls for a new look at the patterns of our days. We need to be able to recognize our way out of those patterns instead of merely repeating them--are we living out of resistance and fear and lack and running away from? Or are we living out of abundance and creative energy and walking toward?

Each of these patterns has an impact on our lives, our families, our businesses.

In our first free teleseminar of 2010, we will outline and share our new Circle Project CHOICE POINT model to help clarify the ways in which we sabotage ourselves -- and the ways we can respond more intentionally to those six important CHOICE POINTS that arise for us every single day.

By registering, you'll receive:

• Access to the live class
• An Mp3 of the class if you're not available for the live call
• Access to recordings of our two previous free classes ("Playing with Blocks" & "Splitting Intentions")
• A copy of the CHOICE POINT MODEL we'll be using in the class

We hope you'll join us!

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Free teleseminar tonight (9/30) - handout posted

We are excited to talk with many of you tonight from 7-8pm Eastern about split intentions.

If you haven't yet registered for this free teleseminar, go here for information and to sign up. Those who register will receive the access code for the class as well as access to the recording after the class is completed (especially handy if you can't join us live tonight!)

We covered so much material in our June free class that folks asked for a "handout" to follow along during the call. You can find the handout for tonight's class here. Hope that helps as you listen in tonight.

Free Teleseminar, Sept 30th - "Are you splitting your intentions?"

This quarter, our free teleseminar is all about intentions. "Are you splitting your intentions?" will explore how to tell if your intentions are split, the costs of doing so, and how to resolve those splits. We hope you'll listen in to this conversation between Circle Project co-founders, Patti Digh and David Robinson.

September 30, 2009

7-8pm Eastern

The session will be recorded for those unable to join us live, as was our very popular teleseminar, "Playing with Blocks" in June.

To register (and gain access to the call and recording), go here. We hope to see you there!

Finding meaning in your work--and in your life.

We're offering two opportunities this fall that will help you find more meaning and intentionality in your work---and in your life.

October 12, 2009 - January 4, 2010 / where you are

We've had many requests for another offering of our successful "LiveNow" telecoaching series, so we are opening a class for only 20 people this October for twelve weeks of telephone classes and group coaching. Space is limited and filling fast! This will be our last coaching class for 2009.

November 5-8, 2010 / Asheville, NC

Our "Life is a Verb" retreats are always an enriching, enlightening experience for us as well as the people who attend. We limit the size to provide for a deeply meaningful retreat experience for everyone, without participants having to navigate the needs of a large group. We have only six spots left for this November session. It's a great way to end the year and look to 2010 with fresh eyes...

Why training doesn't work

Since the beginning, the consistent dilemma we face is that we pop open significant conversations for our clients in one-day or half-day workshops and then we leave.  With the challenges clarified, the dysfunction uncovered, the dream articulated - at the very moment the real work begins, we leave.

 

What is our responsibility to our clients? Are we truly serving their needs when we leave them exposed, knowing they will re-enter the patterns, the demands of the day-to-day rendering them incapable of making the changes they desire?

 

The real task of organizational change is one of re-patterning: taking small consistent steps toward a specific intention. The steps themselves are rarely difficult. Identifying the intention and clarifying the steps is the first challenge and in this The Circle Project has been very effective.

 

However, organizations are like people, chief among the obstacles to progress is the belief that the revelation (the awareness) is all that is required to motivate and make change ("we'll change because we see the problem"); as any smoker can attest, this is a flawed assumption.

 

In times of growth we experience conflicting desires: the necessity of change meets the craving for safety and the known; old patterns are always stronger than new intentions because they are known and, therefore, easy. As financial guru Rich Keal proclaims, "people won't change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the fear of changing."

 

Single day workshops are incapable of supporting businesses in long-term efforts of re-patterning. We watch clients, year after year, experience significant revelations in our workshops. Following the session we provide a written evaluation and offer specific suggestions of "next steps" for them to take, but within a short period the old patterns of operation will overwhelm their good intentions and we'll start the cycle over again with another one-day workshop the same time next year.

 

We've never been good at doing anything in same-old-way and expecting new results. Stirring the pot and leaving our clients to re-pattern themselves will not serve them in 2009 any better than it did in 2008 so we're changing our strategy.

 

We believe to be of real value we need to support the activation of our client's revelations by helping them re-pattern and achieve the change they desire. In this economy, no one can afford to buy a day of training that leads nowhere. We are building long-term contracts, multiple sessions over the course of a year or more, designed with our clients, with individual coaching as connective tissue between the sessions. The coaching is key to the success of our new strategy.

 

Coaching is a designed relationship in which the power lives with the client; the coach isn't a repository of answers but is there to support for the client in gaining clarity, articulating their goals and taking the necessary steps over the long term to achieve their intentions. Helping our clients achieve their intentions is our intention.

 

So, The Circle Project is evolving. For information on our new model of coaching opportunities, contact us. We would love to explore how our new work can make your workplace more productive, more innovative, more effective, and--dare we say it?--more human.

 

Available now - Free Recording of our recent Teleseminar, "PLAYING WITH BLOCKS"

In our recent one-hour free teleseminar, PLAYING WITH BLOCKS: What Keeps Us Out of Intention," we talked about three primary "blocks":

1) False comparisons with Others

2) False expectations of Self

3) False investment in "The Story"

Here's some of the feedback we've received so far:

"Patti and David understand what holds people back, their firsthand stories will sound so familiar to people who doubt themselves and their gifts. More than this, they understand what it takes to get beyond those doubts and do their own true work and make a difference in the world. Their compassion, commitment and true wisdom will give you the tools and the courage to do the same!" -Terri, Rochester NY

"This introductory class was well worth the hour of time I invested. Patti and David clearly love what they do and are excited about offering their learning to others. It is evident that they are real people who will work as guides not gurus." - Linda McLyman, Syracuse NY

"I signed up for the PLAYING WITH BLOCKS tele-seminar in June 09 thinking "let's just hear what they have to say". As a fan of Patti's book, LIFE IS A VERB: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally .. I expected it to be good. ONE HOUR on the phone with these two powerful, filled-with-good-intention "teachers", and I was convinced that I could use a 6-mo commitment to myself & to the Seminar to CLEAR MY BLOCKS - my fears of moving ahead with the life I so want to live. Thank you!" - Anonymous

This call was a brief preview of our upcoming 6-month Telecoaching Class, LIVE YOUR WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE NOW!, which will begin July 7th. Folks from around the world are joining us for that coaching journey toward a more intentional, mindful life - and we'd love to have you join us! Go here to find out more and to register!

If you'd like access to the free recording of the hour-long teleseminar, PLAYING WITH BLOCKS, complete this form and you'll receive it automatically!

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Mindful living. Mindful working.

The Circle Project announces a unique TeleCoaching Course!

In response to our clients having to reduce travel budgets in these tough economic times, we are so pleased to announce a unique new class that brings The Circle Project to you via the telephone. This is a low-cost way to engage around compelling questions that have a direct impact on your work--and your life.

If you or those on your team could benefit from hands-on coaching from Patti and David, the co-founders of The Circle Project known for their unique, innovative approaches, go here for more information!

We hope you'll join us and open this opportunity to others in your organization. We'd love to explore with you new ways of living and working so you are values- rather than circumstance-driven.

Circle Project co-founders to teach two new courses at Summer Institute

We're delighted to announce two new classes that we'll teach during the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC) this July in Portland, Oregon (on the campus of Reed College):

Hip Hop, Manga, Twitter and other new tools for Intercultural Communication Patti is delighted to teach this course with Amer Ahmed from the University of Michigan.
July 15-17, 2009

Diversity in Action: Advanced Experiential Tools for Intercultural Learning
Patti and David will teach this new course, exploring new (radical) ways to teach and learn.
July 20-24, 2009

The Summer Institute provides a unique, residential experience to learn with faculty and peers from around the world. Come, join us!

Reduction Instruction - teaching as a subversive activity

[This is an excerpted draft from our forthcoming book, TOAST RULES: 10 Ways to Burn Your Organization (and Yourself)]

At a recent faculty dinner, our tablemates were discussing something they called “Premature Cognitive Conditioning.” “What’s that?” David wondered aloud. One of them gave an example: “if you want to train an elephant, you chain the baby elephant to a tree with an enormous chain. Over time, you reduce the size of the chain and the tree until the elephant, now fully grown, is contained with nothing more than a flimsy rope and a small twig. The elephant has learned at an early age that is impossible to escape, regardless of the reality of the flimsy rope and the twig. It has made a ‘commitment’ to its limitations based on its early life experiences.”

Another tablemate told of an article he’d read about how fish in aquariums are trained by placing large glass partitions between the different species.  “After some time,” he proclaimed, “the partitions are removed and the fish are incapable of swimming beyond the point where there once was a partition!” This commitment to limitation isn’t limited to animals—humans invest huge amounts of trust in their own length of flimsy string, those “unwritten rules” by which we live, the ways in which we quash creative questioning and reinforce limitations on others.

REDUCTION INSTRUCTION

In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote a terrific book entitled Teaching As A Subversive Activity. As relevant today as when first published, it offers some clues about what happens to, “YES,” and about how “yes, but…” came to be cobbled together. Here’s the root challenge they address in the book: “What students do mostly in class is guess what teacher wants them to say.” (pg. 19)

Our current emphasis on standardized tests—and their impact on teaching—reveals how little has changed since Postman and Weingartner first published their assault on outdated teaching methods. Here’s the crisis they outlined:

“…let us remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing (partially and temporarily) somebody else’s answers to somebody else’s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking questions – is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not ‘taught’ in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued.” (Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, pp 24 – 25)

Our current national conversation about the educational system fixates on test scores and ignores the underlying structure that produces them. Content-focused learning will always produce mediocre results as will bottom-line focused businesses. These structures produce elephants held in place by the thinnest of strings because that is what they were designed to do. Chain a child brimming with “YES!” to a desk (sit up straight, don’t talk) and teach her that 1) her natural curiosity is a disruption and has limited value in school, 2) there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and 3) the teacher is the keeper of the distinction.

Over time, the child will reduce the scope and range of her natural curiosity and become a master of mining the teacher for the “right” answer. The goal is to fill in the correct bubble. When she enters adulthood and the workforce she’ll know that something is missing, that she is living too small but won’t really know what that means. Her employer won’t worry about her wandering beyond the limits of her reduced creative capacity because she has made a premature cognitive commitment to the idea that her curiosity is dangerous and the right answer is located elsewhere if she can only find an expert to illuminate it. Yet, simultaneously, her employer will be critical of her because she shows limited self-initiative. A flimsy rope and a small stick, “yes, but…” is prison enough.

Circle Project's Patti Digh to keynote Great Ideas Conference

On Monday, February 23rd from 8:00am-9:30am, Circle Project co-founder Patti Digh will keynote the prestigious Great Ideas Conference hosted by ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership in Miami. Focused on her newest book (Life is a Verb) and using story as her main tool, the keynote address will explore six practices for intentional living.

An association leader and ASAE/The Center Board member, Jeff De Cagna, recently re-posted an earlier podcast with Patti and the opening keynote speaker for the conference, Dan Roam. Roam is author of the best-selling business book, The Back of the Napkin, and will speak at the opening of the conference on Saturday afternoon, February 21st.

ASAE and The Center have graciously agreed to offer one-day registrations, so if you're in the Miami area and would enjoy hearing either of us speak, call Anne Blouin at 202-626-ASAE.

David Robinson featured on The Knowledge Omnivore

Circle Project co-founder David Robinson was featured this week on The Knowledge Omnivore in an essay recognizing not only his artistic contributions as a painter but also his thinking about diversity issues:

"We are moving too fast to see clearly. We are so inundated with information that we meet complex challenges with simplistic thinking and are astounded when we’ve further complicated the challenge. Surrounded by information, we are uninformed. There is an old Chinese parable; an image of hell in which people sit amidst a fantastic feast, starving because their chopsticks are 3 feet long and they are incapable of getting the food to their mouths.

The need to reduce in order to keep up is a lose/lose strategy. Human beings are no different than any other animal when forced into a survival mode: it’s fight or flight. Careful consideration is not part of the repertoire. Vision is limited. Forget about creating, intentionality or constructive change. Reptilian brain all but guarantees lower order thinking."

To read more of his thoughts, visit The Knowledge Omnivore.

Circle Project featured at national Diversity Summit

Circle Project co-founder Patti Digh was recently featured as a keynote speaker for the national Diversity Summit of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). The Summit was convened to gather association executives and thought leaders for two days of dialogue on diversity and inclusion issues facing nonprofit and association leaders. Digh's remarks focused on addressing diversity issues at a "structure of the land" level, rather than focusing on issues that remain on the surface of the conversation about diversity and inclusion.

Several association executives provided their feedback on Digh’s contribution to the Summit:

“Patti’s presentation did in one hour, what others couldn’t do in days….provide a clear, compelling, and inspiring case for living diversity, not just doing diversity. She is engaging, thoughtful, respectful and provides compelling examples that create empathy and understanding in the audience while creating a desire to act and change. ‘Power’ has been defined as the ability to affect change, after hearing Patti, I have never felt so powerful or energized to really change.” – Gregory Fine

"Patti Digh does not mince words or concepts. She showed us how actions can happen with desire, passion, and commitment." – Joan Eisenstodt

"As usual, Patti brought her unique blend of passionate belief, common sense thinking and good humor to the complex and difficult issues of diversity and inclusion. Patti's invaluable perspectives created new dimensions of depth and meaning in our dialogue. I can say with great confidence that everyone who participated in the ASAE & The Center Diversity Summit was delighted with Patti's contributions to this crucial conversation." – Jeff De Cagna

Patti was also a keynote speaker on diversity at the ASAE Annual Conference in San Diego in August 2008, and will be a keynote speaker at the ASAE Great Ideas Conference in Miami in February 2009.

If you would like a highly regarded diversity speaker for your next event, contact Patti Digh in our Asheville, NC, office at 828-280-5766 or David Robinson in our Seattle, WA, office at 206-853-8289.

PODCAST from Australia features Circle Project co-founder Patti Digh

I was delighted to have a conversation recently with Viv McWaters and Geoff Brown, both based in Australia. In their interview with me, you'll hear about my new book, LIFE IS A VERB, but also about the work of The Circle Project and how (and why) we work in the ways we do. I hope you'll enjoy it. I know I'm wishing I had an Australian accent after listening to it...

Go to the Patti Digh Winkipodcast here 

Winkipod And Patti Digh

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: 37 days)

Seeing and Believing

Recently, the employees of a large multinational corporation voted to go on strike. They estimate that action will cost the company millions of dollars each day of the strike. This morning I had a conversation with a manager representing one of the many diversity teams within the company; she and her team are frustrated because her executives see no point in paying attention to the “soft” stuff like relationship. The team is having a hard time getting traction. She told me, “It’s all about the bottom line. If it doesn’t directly impact the bottom line they don’t want to hear about it.” She asked the question that all companies ask us, “How do I get them to see how important this (relationship) is?”

The short answer is, “You can’t.” For two reasons:

First, there is an old cliché line that everybody knows, it goes something like this, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It’s a nice line but it’s backwards. To be accurate, the sentiment should be, “I’ll see it because I believe it.” We perceive what we expect to see. One of the foundational beliefs in business (American-style) is that relationship and “the bottom line” live in opposition to each other.

How many times have you heard, “Don’t take it personally, it’s just business”? The underlying assumption is, of course, that relationship costs money. And it does - because relationship takes time, and we've heard many times that “time is money.” Sadly, that’s only half of the accounting--but it’s the half that gets reinforced so the myopic focus on the bottom line blinds business to the costs of lost opportunity and the mangling of their intangible assets. They don’t believe it so they can’t see it. If losses in the millions of dollars a day will not pop open the eyes of business leaders to the concrete dollars and sense of valuing relationship, nothing will.

The second reason is more problematic. Values, morality and ethics live in the “relationship” column. If the bottom line is the sole driver of all decisions, then we are relieved of the responsibility of asking (in a serious way), “what are we doing, why are we doing it, should we be doing it, what is the long range impact of what we are doing, how are we treating each other,….”  I’m not insinuating ill intent; in fact, quite the opposite.

Values reveal themselves in actions. Those important questions are being asked, and asked and asked and asked by well-intended individuals within organizations that are in service to something that refuses to consider their humanity as valuable. If, for the larger organism, “it’s all about the bottom line,” then to the individuals inside the organism, there are very few available answers to their questions; none of the answers is really palatable so the only remaining choice is to continually ask the question (thus, the perpetual pursuit of the business case). All of the other options will remain invisible, or at least unbelievable, until there is a shift in values.

-David Robinson

Why Experiential: Beyond the Abstract to the Embodied

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. -Franklin P. Jones

My friend, Sam, is an extraordinarily gifted facilitator and coach. He helps corporations have hard conversations. Let’s face it, organizations are no better than individuals at having difficult conversations. They avoid, deny, pretend, and justify just like the rest of us.

Sam was working with a multinational corporation: people in power suits sitting around a larger-than-life, acres-long, mahogany and oak boardroom table employing every avoidance strategy in their arsenal (blackberries and cell phones are fantastic tools for avoidance), maintaining their aura of “professional.” In exasperation, Sam slid ever-so-slowly out of his leather power chair and underneath the table. In the shocked silence that followed, Sam watched all the legs fidget until one curious face looked beneath the table. Sam waved and motioned for that person to join him. Then another face looked. Sam and his new ally waved and motioned and that person slid under the table to be with them. One by one, all of the power suits slid under the table and joined Sam. When they were all “under the table,” Sam said, “now that we’re all together, can we finally begin talking about what’s really going on in this organization?” They had a very difficult and honest conversation and began to address the real issues.

When Sam slid under the table, his work became experiential, he neutralized all the roles being played, removed the status games so that his clients could reach beyond the abstract and reveal what was personal and relevant about their challenges. Most trainings or interventions are designed to raise awareness about an issue; the underlying assumption is that behavior will change when awareness is heightened. It’s a flawed assumption. Think about it, if raising awareness were enough to change behavior then there wouldn’t be a single cigarette smoker on the face of the planet.

Language, talking about issues (and around issues), is inadequate when significant change is needed. We act when we identify, when the required change becomes personal, when the need reaches beyond the abstract and engages the feelings of each individual. The word, “experiential” in experiential learning is not about games or movement or manufactured experiences, it is about connecting to each participant’s personal experiences. Perhaps the most significant reason, the “bottom-line” reason for business is this: abstract knowledge is not accessible in a difficult moment.

Companies feel the need to protect themselves against all the “isms’ that happen in the workplace, all the potential missteps that happen in an “edge” moment and consequently become a crisis. Knowledge and rules are available before or after the fact. Regardless of our belief to the contrary, people are not rational nor are they objective when feeling threatened. Choices only become more available in “hot” situations if, in training, they’ve already had the physical experience of what they actually do when they come to an edge – it is different than what they think they do.

Our belief is that most people want to do the right thing and will choose not to react from an “ism” if they recognize that there is a choice, if they’ve been to an edge before and have learned to react by slowing down, paying attention to their thoughts, and suspending judgments.

-David Robinson

Clearly stupid mistakes

-David Robinson

I am surrounded by books. I love books. They are like people; some are merely acquaintances while others become dear friends that I visit often. One of my favorites is Influence by Robert Cialdini. I spent the morning rereading the last chapter because it has been haunting me, sitting in the back of my mind for months. He posits that with the pace of technological change and the explosion of information, we’ve had to adjust the way we make decisions. He believes that although we all want to make carefully considered decisions, “More and more we are forced to resort to another decision-making approach – a shortcut approach in which the decision to comply (or agree or believe or buy) is made on the basis of a single, usually reliable piece of information.” The operative word is “usually.” He continues, “An isolated piece of information, even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly stupid mistakes….”

This is the great paradox; the tiger trap hidden in the jungles of contemporary business and life. We are moving too fast to see clearly. We are so inundated with information that we meet complex challenges with simplistic thinking and are astounded when we’ve further complicated the challenge. Surrounded by information, we are uninformed. There is an old Chinese parable; an image of hell in which people sit amidst a fantastic feast, starving because their chopsticks are 3 feet long and they are incapable of getting the food to their mouths.

The need to reduce in order to keep up is a lose/lose strategy. Human beings are no different than any other animal when forced into a survival mode: it’s fight or flight. Careful consideration is not part of the repertoire. Vision is limited. Forget about creating, intentionality or constructive change. Reptilian brain all but guarantees lower order thinking.

Does your organization really need a “business case” for diversity? Do you even recognize the absurdity of making a business case for an espoused value? Would you willingly reduce any of your values into numbers, dollars and cents? For instance, what’s the cost of a family value? If it’s too expensive, should we consider not doing it? What else have you reduced in an effort to keep up? Have you reduced your news source to a single point? Can the moral questions of our time really be reduced to a single phrase or point of view (pro-life, pro-choice)? In a global economy can anything as complex as immigration be reduced to something so simplistic as “illegal or not illegal?”

The signs of reduced thinking are all around us if we choose to pay attention. The trouble is, paying attention takes time.

Mind the incentives

-David Robinson

I just watched Michael Moore’s film, Sicko. It’s about health care – or the lack of health care - in the United States. Among the many salient points made in the film, I was reminded that one need only look at the incentive structures of a system to see the actual values (as opposed to the espoused values) of the system. For instance, Moore makes the point that doctors in France are offered incentives according to the number of people they help, where as doctors in the United States are offered incentives according to the amount of money they save insurance companies. Simply put, in France, the money is used in support of the people and in the United States the people are used in support of the money. Values betray themselves in actions. Incentives are nothing more than values in actions.

When I was a graduate student I had the opportunity to assist a great theatre director named Bob Moss. One day at lunch I asked him for the single best bit of advice he could give me if I wanted to be successful in the theatre. His answer was immediate, “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, “if you want to be successful in anything, simply do what you say you can do.” Sage advice.

I think of Bob Moss every time I enter a company and read their value statements. Generally, The Circle Project is hired because there is a gap between the stated value of a company and how it is being expressed (or not) in the actions of the company. When an organization says, “we value team,” but the reward structure is based on individual merit, then there is a gap. When the company says diversity is a core value but evidence of diversity disappears the higher up the ladder you climb, then there is a gap.

Gaps are not always indictments. Sometimes they are incentives. Because they betray what we really value as opposed to what we say we value, gaps present opportunities to either align our actions with our words or to change our words. They provide the opportunity for us to not only do what we say we can do, but more importantly, be what we say we are.

Taking positions

-David Robinson

Todd was passing through Seattle on his way to Portland. When he visits, I like to probe his point of view. He’s Canadian, a gifted thinker, and because he concerns himself with the happenings in the world he always has interesting perspectives. Since we are in an election season, I questioned him about what he sees as the hidden challenges we face in the United States. His insight was especially compelling:

“The great challenge facing America” he said, “particularly evident in this election season, is that you take positions too quickly. It’s almost impossible for you to have substantive debate about any issue because you rush to defend your positions before you’ve had the opportunity to consider the worth of the opposing point of view. In fact, listening to the opposition is treated as a sign of weakness, immediately branded as ‘wishy-washy.’”

Listen to the language used in framing the nightly news. We are red states and blue states, pro-life or pro-choice, for guns or against them. Have we lost our middle ground? Are we stuck in a vicious cycle capable only of trying to apply tame solutions to wicked problems, thereby further complicating them? Do we really believe that we can learn anything of substance from our candidates in a debate format that allows only 2 minutes for response and a minute for rebuttal? Do we really want to hear a substantive debate? Would we take the time to listen, eschew our sound-byte mentality?

Do an experiment: listen to the conversations around you, not for substance but for the framing. I’m writing this in a coffee house and I just heard someone say, “Republicans are idiots!” Listen to the story you tell yourself; count the number of times a day you engage in justifying your point of view, how many times a day do you plant a flag in the sand to claim that your view is right? Count the number of times you reduce or negate  someone because of their opinion? How many times a day do you reduce your self?

As Todd suggested, we would do well to step back and listen and consider that the other point of view might be as valid as ours. We would do well if we refused to reduce our selves and our issues to the simplistic. What would our places of work and our communities be like if we addressed diversity because we valued it and had no need to justify our values with a business case? What if we let go of the misguided notion that there is a standardized test capable of measuring individual learning? What if we took the time to deal with a global economic challenge like illegal immigration in all of its complexity and believed we were capable of more than building a wall?

Further reading: For an interesting discussion of this idea of reducing to a single point, see Amin Maalouf's In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, and David Berreby's Us and Them.