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If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach. … For perhaps, by being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.
Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.
“entered” through Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, an autobiographical account of one man’s journey in search of enlightenment.
Most of us aren’t very good at perceiving reality as it is. Most of what we “see” is shaped by our impressions, our history, our baggage, our preconceptions. We can’t see people as they really are because we’re too busy reacting to our own internal experiences of what they evoke in us, so we rarely actually relate to reality. We mostly relate to internal remembrances of our own history, stimulated and evoked by whatever is externally before us.
First, Joe said, we need to be open to fundamental shifts of mind. We have very deep mental models of how the world works, deeper than we can know. To think that the world can ever change without changes in our mental models is folly. When I asked Joe more specifically what these changes might be about, he said that it’s about a shift from seeing a world made up of things to seeing a world that’s open and primarily made up of relationships, where whatever is manifest, whatever we see, touch, feel, taste, and hear, whatever seems most real to us, is actually nonsubstantial. A deeper level of
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Once we understand this, we begin to see that the future is not fixed, that we live in a world of possibilities. And yet almost all of us carry around a deep sense of resignation. We’re resigned to believing we can’t have any influence in the world, at least not on a scale that matters. So we focus on the small scale, where we think we can have an influence.
Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
It was all part of my experiment with trust of and patience with the natural flow of life, with being open to the next step, and then taking it when the moment seemed right.
could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be
activity that involves influencing, directing, guiding, helping or nurturing, the whole tone of the relationship is conditioned by one’s faith in human possibilities. That is the generative element, the source of the current that gives life to the relationship.
Each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself. … His task was to discover his own destiny—not an arbitrary one—and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.
In those early years, Warren Bennis, Tom Cronin, and Harlan Cleveland took a major role in the development of the curriculum. Harlan and his committee formulated their views as a series of eight propositions: 1. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of self-knowledge. 2. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of appreciation for the nature of leadership itself. 3. The trouble with American leaders is their focus on concepts that separate (communities, nations, disciplines, fields, methods, etc.), rather than concepts that express our interconnectedness. 4. The trouble with
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more importantly at the tacit level, the unspoken level that cannot be described. Dialogue does not require people to agree with each other. Instead, it encourages people to participate in a pool of shared meaning that leads to aligned action.
Other people might tend to fall into different kinds of traps, but for me, responsibility was the big one. I had to learn to distinguish between concern and obsessive worry. I could be concerned about my partners and colleagues without worrying about their well-being.
It’s critical that you focus on the result and not get attached to any particular process for achieving the result.
It’s a little bit like sailing. If you’re focused on your course rather than your destination, you’re in big trouble. If you were to be blown off course, you would never simply return to the course you were on. No one would sail that way. Rather, you would focus on the destination and set a new course. But that’s the way we live our lives. We get attached to our assumptions about how things should get done, and we lose sight of what we’re trying to create.
“All great things are done for their own sake.”
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. —George Bernard Shaw
There are two aspects of commitment. There is a commitment to take action, which is symbolically represented, for instance, by my leaving the firm. How do you know people are committed? Because they are taking action. They are crossing the threshold of adventure, and this is the necessary first step toward the inner transformation Greenleaf spoke about. This is the kind of action we ordinarily speak of in business and in management circles.
ground of being for taking action. My appreciation of this second aspect of commitment had begun to
Spanish poet A. Machado: “Wanderer, there is no path. You lay a path in walking.”
They are “invisible, intangible, inaudible, tasteless, and odorless,” and yet in quantum theory, they are the substance of the universe.
conclusion back to the whole team, presented it to them, and began the process of tearing the
“Today,” he said, “there is only one entity whose effort to create stability in the world matches its self-interest. That entity is a corporation acting globally.”
Bohm had spoken with me in London about the relationship between “reality” and language: The implicate order is in the first instance a language. It’s not a description of reality but a language, an inner language, where you cannot associate each word to a thing. It’s more like music. You cannot say one note means anything. It’s like a painting. There are various spots of paint in an impressionist painting, but when you step back to see the picture, there is no correspondence between the spots of paint and what you see in the picture. Similarly, the implicate order and its mathematics does not
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books that it dawned on me who he was—the coauthor of such pathbreaking books as The Tree of Knowledge and The Embodied Mind.
In particular, as humans, the only world we can have is the one we also create together through our language and interactions.
“His work demonstrated the capacity for certain chemical systems—he named them ‘dissipative structures’—to regenerate to higher levels of self-organization in response to environmental demands.
in each case a network of interacting elements gives rise to the emergence of a new entity with completely new properties. If you try to pinpoint the ‘conductor,’ it is nowhere to be found. You cannot pinpoint it.”
The fact is, he said, “our language and our nervous system combine to constantly construct our environment. We can only see what we talk about, because we are speaking ‘blind,’ beyond language.
Language is like another set of eyes and hands for the nervous system, through which we coordinate actions with others. We exist in language. It is by languaging and recurrent actions or human practices that we create meaning
But for this recurrent practice, it would not exist for its present purpose.
transcripts of the conversation, alone and, subsequently, with Alain. As I considered the importance of language and how human beings interact with the world, it struck me that in many ways the development of language was like the discovery of fire—it was such an incredible primordial force. I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s
nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.
“Our problem is that we hardly have the vocabulary or language to describe all of this—to talk about what it means to be human in this world.”
It is a paradox: confronting the lack of substance in the universe and in our lives is the source of our creativity.
When we are in touch with our ‘open nature,’ our emptiness, we exert an enormous attraction to other human beings.
Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning. —Martin Buber
It was only later that I began to understand another, deeper aspect of commitment. This kind of commitment begins not with will, but with willingness.
“He must sacrifice his puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to his grand will, which quits defined for destined being.”
It’s an acknowledgment that words and concepts no longer suffice, and that any attempt to articulate in any intentional way no longer suffices. “I’ve seen many times in dialogue sessions,” Peter said, “when we literally could not find words to speak. In fact, the incredible imprecision and inaccuracy of words was full in the room—and we just sat there looking in silence at one another.”
prevailing philosophy of the East is that the immeasurable is the primary reality. In this view, the entire structure and order of forms that present themselves to us in ordinary perception and reason are regarded as a sort of veil—a veil that covers up the true reality which cannot be perceived by the senses and of which nothing can be said or thought.”
“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal-mouse asked a wild dove. “Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer. “In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal-mouse said. “I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow—not heavily, not in a raging blizzard—no, just like in a dream, without a wound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you
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THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT. —Albert Einstein
“the real fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds.”
“Only a part of the implicate can ever be unfolded at any one time,” Peat said. “The rest remains inaccessible to our explicate world. At any one time only a limited aspect of the implicate order can be made explicate.”
3. There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe. Connection to this Source leads to the emergence of new realities—discovery, creation, renewal, and transformation. We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.
ultimate organizing principle of the universe—
creating reality through our dynamic dialogue with Source. In this subtle domain, there is not just a one-way communication but a two-way
Lee Nichol, who had been Bohm’s principal collaborator as Bohm developed his ideas about collective thinking and communication.
