Making sense of the space between

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

These are the words of Vaclav Havel, still inviting us to consider what it is to ‘make sense’.

Our skills of sense-making, our sensitivity, our creative attunement, are deeply needed in all aspects of our interconnected lives these days. Children sometimes exhibit these abilities better than those of us who have successfully, conscientiously and sadly adjusted to a less sensitive, less painful mode; those of us who have, by accident or design, dulled our senses. Yet, on balance, we have education systems that are struggling to prepare children and young people even for our current circumstances. There’s some kind of idea that the children, and the future, can be fixed.  Some requirement for our children also to be dulled, to stop reminding us what we have become.

So, if you are an elder, or perhaps simply ‘older’, how could your influence better serve the ones who follow? 

 

As William James said, ‘Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.’ For me, a here-and-now conversation that crosses generations might be helpful, so that whatever wisdom the elders have mustered can be re-crafted in relationship with the wisdom of youth.  This is not the same as just the elders having their say, or just the youth. It is what can happen at that precious, intricate place that we call a frontier – a frontier between the known and the not-yet-known. The foundational place of the poetic.

But to do this we all need to invite and not impose. We need to imaginatively give up on any details we imagined.  Our praxis can't dictate terms for others.

 If you will be disappointed by the lack of an outcome that was never in your gift, however needed and sane it seems in our troubled times, then you may need to hope in a different way.

 

So, my resolutions for 2018: to travel in that different hope, learning to speak and to live more poetically.

And bombs fall and children die and people make art and cry and try though the whole of the thing seems so badly awry and we stand in between what we know and we don’t and we just have to stand though it sticks in the throat and we still have to stand, stand through hope to no hope then stand on again, find a way, more than cope.  

But it’s not that we’re sad. More bemused by the joke that we still haven’t got what it takes to not croak. And you’ve got to admit that there’s joy to be had in the smallest of gestures: it’s really not mad to laugh for a reason no others can see, to be what the moment just asks you to be. To do this because humankind can be kind.

This is how it is in a liminal time.

© Julie S Allan January 2018

With acknowledgement to pioneers of the human spirit, awareness, connectedness and creativity including Nora Bateson, Margaret Wheatley, David Whyte, Philip Pullman and Sir Ken Robinson for words along the way.  I don’t claim to represent their views.

Poetry in Motion

Asking increasingly beautiful questions is a a fundamentally beautiful practice that poet David Whyte encourages.  His salon series, which I joined for the past year in a small company of others, was an oasis for such explorations.  Academic pursuits, like other institutionalised endeavours, can lack life's full juice - a caricature that's all head and not much else - yet poets can provide a wellspring even there. And it's vital that they do.


Taking my academic research to a Higher Education Academy dissemination event early this year, a senior academic whose name I am sorry I didn't write down, responded enthusiastically to my interest in poetry. And, to my relief, so did others.  He asked me, "Have you read Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry"? I had not. "I was lucky to hear him speak.  You should get it."  So I did.

The HEA event was something of a redress itself: a chance to glimpse exceptional attention to enthralling enquiry, enquiry finding space in which to keep breathing itself alive during troubled times for thinkers of any stripe, academic or other-wise. And in Heaney's Redress I found what I had been going on about, only put much more elegantly:

"I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing." (p201 Kindle edition).

This was implicit, he wrote, in a poem from a sequence called 'Lightenings' in his 1991 book Seeing Things.  Heaney had been considering the experience of being in two minds, of finding harmony, or not, when worldviews seem to exclude. He seemed to me to say that there might yet be fruitful redress through which different futures could be brought into being, and different relationships forged, whatever the prevailing institutional circumstance. The poem was this:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain,

"This man can't bear our life here and will drown,"

The abbott said, "unless we help him." So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

If you think, as I currently do, that organisations are conversational creations, and leadership perhaps like-wise, then you may too be heartened to consider the sort of conversations and beautiful questions that redress might enable, and might enable redress. 

If the aridity is, however, permitted to reach tongue-stilling dimensions -- as I sometimes lose heart and believe to be true -- I then wonder what form of rain dance is needed.

It's a question for us all. What poetic practice is ours to offer, to serve good sense and wiser ways?

Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber and Faber.  This text contains ten lectures given while the author was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-1994).

David Whyte can be found here.

En coeur age

'I don't know how you've done it,' is a phrase I've heard a lot in the past couple of months, and I'd like to thank anybody who said it to me, because it contained the very heartening subtext that I was doing at least as well as folk whose capabilities I thoroughly respect. I have not kept up to the blog in recent months while I have instead attended to a school move and house move via six weeks without a home, work responsibilities and guest editing Part 2 of the e-O&P edition on Wisdom in Organisations (publication imminent). Apologies to anything I've missed out.

Oh, and a Significant Birthday floated through in the midst of all this. Some people go on a world tour or maybe throw a big party. I walked through gardens, sometimes in the rain, and had a very decent lunch. I was entirely content. I had lovely gifts and thoughtful friends who arranged an impromptu Happy Birthday while hosting my family for an Olympic visit.

So, the 'it' I've been doing seems, on balance, to be a succession of engaging moments and events, and the opportunity to admire my children's navigation of the unfolding world around them.  Put like that, perhaps I shouldn't have needed the encouragement. But, actually, I did. And I will again.

We could take the view that people who seem to be getting along just fine don't need the encouragement, but there wasn't an Olympic athlete who, even at the world-beating top of their game, said any such thing. 

So, we weren't there for the Age of the Enlightenment, but who's for creating the Age of the Encouragement, to see what such a heartening approach could achieve?

Essential skills for the future?

The e-O&P edition I've been busy guest editing/curating, on the subject of wisdom in organisations (see previous blog), is nearing completion. And I'm still trying to get a bit more into it on the subject of education and how we are trying to prepare children to play their part in the emerging future.
Sir Ken Robinson has made some joyful and provocative points on the subject of creativity and education, which you'll readily find via TED Talks and the RSA Animates.  I'm sure I'll come back to these in a future blog, however in the meantime I found this article that has nine useful skills or abilities to nurture. It doesn't recommend how they should be nurtured, specifically, but all good to consider.

I'm wondering whether I'd have the same list or a different one. Maybe I'll share it with the children and see what they have to say; perhaps they already know what's needed to be able to navigate an unknown future.
DailyGood: 9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn, by Leo Babauta
http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=194

Visibility and co-evolution

I’ve been busy of late, home educating and house-hunting aside, continuing my work with narratives and story in organisations where there is a great need and desire to share good practice and to evidence ‘impact’.  I’ve also been writing about same for an AMED journal edition on Making the Invisible Visible, and I’ve been guest editing (curating, as I’m now thinking of it) the Summer edition of that journal, on the topic of Wisdom.

I’m just overwhelmingly pleased and even pleased by that overwhelm. How wonderful is this opportunity to be inspired by the thoughts, actions and connections catalysed by the generous thinking and exploration of others . . . I'll pass on just a couple of connections for now because they concern good reads by good folk:

My colleague Barbara Heinzen, in our book (with much missed co author Gerard Fairtlough), wrote: ‘Stories are the sharing of intricate knowledge. . . they help us to work through complex situations in ways that may be based on logic, but may also be based on experience, emotion, metaphor and allegory. . .’ (The Power of the Tale, Wiley 2002, p230).

In that book, a man called Don Michael received a grateful dedication from Barbara and Gerard. From what I know, Don was something of a provocateur. Not for the sake of it but from keen and compassionate exploration of human behavior and something of a lack of interest in towing any particular line. Barbara and Gerard spoke of him with such respect that I came to think of 'Don' as a title rather than a name. 

At the end of February, a collection of Don’s work arrived at my door. It was sent to me for review by Andrew Carey of Triarchy Press in a collation by Graham Leicester of the International Futures Forum. It’s a thought-provoking read called In Search of the Missing Elephant. Graham, I'm glad to say, is writing something for the Wisdom journal edition: if you haven’t yet read his Ten Things to Do in a Conceptual Emergency (Triarchy Press), please please do.  

These folk each have their own streams, but there’s a confluence around the links between learning, creativity and wiser outcomes.  To come back to the work I’m loving, using story for evaluation, it’s making visible the important texture of everyday life, events and connections that may otherwise be invisible through lack of noticing. If we can’t notice and share, we can’t learn, create or co-evolve wiser outcomes.  

AMED network home page http://www.amed.org.uk/

Emerging wisdom

It’s the early morning train out of town. I sit and watch the even earlier arriving into town as I leave. I cross the river, with its pink-tint buildings and pink-tint bridge. Or so I write. And it’s not true.  My imagining would like that, and parts of the sky have a tint, over the water, but the buildings are crisply almost themselves and most of the bridge is hidden beneath the train.  The true bit is that I cross the river and know I have ended and begun. That casual, liminal brightening that is river. Will you wake or will you sleep?

Where best to do the work of the imaginal, the liminal? Sleeping, awake, neither, both?  Wisdom, like science, emerges in the conversation between noticing what is and sensing what is not yet or what could be. Betty Sue Flowers, in Presence, drew attention so succinctly to something I aspire to foster through the work I do: ‘leaders of the future will need to be deeply committed to serving that which is seeking to emerge.’ I’m passionate about what’s seeking to emerge. And, now temporarily home educating my children, very curious about when the great trammeling begins. Or the great inspiring. What is seeking to emerge that we individually and collectively need to serve better?

I’m guest editing a forthcoming AMED journal at the moment. My topic is wisdom. Let’s see where we get to.  I’m sure that in the past I would have been quite happy with the title ‘editor’, especially in my previous career of publishing -- at something of a pace. Now, what I’m doing seems slower: inviting, gathering, reflecting, asking, curating. Curating, I think that might be it.  Wisdom needs curating, not editing?

The thing of it in Stockholm

Blogging postponed for some years, gratitude for the Stockholm event of the International Coaching Psychology Conference (September 2011) got me started. Organised by Per-Olof Eriksson and colleagues at the Swedish Psychological Association, it was a great one-day event. My official part was to speak on Important but Uncertain Matters: Towards Coaching for Wisdom.  Fellow speakers were Stephen Palmer (the development of coaching psychology), Jens-Boris Larsen (accentuating hope), Reinhard Stelter (narrative practice and collaborative working), Magnus Larsson (psychodynamic approaches) and Paul O Olson (state of the art in leadership coaching). There was a lot of engaging information from the speakers and enthusiastic discussion and networking among all.

The intellectual content has stayed with me but also the general approach and fellowship and a fantastic chance to look around Stockholm: beautiful buildings, bridges and water is a hard combination to beat. And, having only recently returned from a first trip to Poland, I found myself conversing about architecture – Poland being only a shortish hop across the water, which I somehow had failed to realize.

Reinhard Stelter begged to differ with me when I had introduced Clarkson’s seven discourses as part of my talk: “when you put up there ‘physiology’, that isn’t phenomenology in my view”.  Turns out we agree on that. 

I picked up the phrase, ‘the thing of it’ from the late and rather great Ken Campell, once upon a time when I was ensconced with a collation of venturers on their way to a production of The Warp.  I’m pretty sure I’d heard it from him previously too, in a Channel 4 programme about chaos and complexity. Anyway, ‘the thing of it’.  You know there is a ‘thing of it’ which you can’t really put your finger on, and it certainly couldn’t be reduced to simple physiology, for example.  Certainly, it couldn’t be reduced at all without ceasing to be ‘the thing of it’ because it’s a holistic type of emergence that goes beyond the parts, or even the sum of them.

The conference had a thing of it, Stockholm has a thing of it, fellowship has a thing of it. Wisdom, too, has a thing of it. Ken may or may not have been referencing Kant and the noumenon that can’t be known (as opposed to the phenomenon, which is all we can know, in that way of thinking). 


Many folk who are far more learned on these topics than I am have argued for ages about this business of the known and not-known, but when it comes to developing wisdom there is one line of enquiry I’m particularly keen on and it’s this: what do we count as knowledge or information, and what are the consequences of that? What are the consequences of the ways we have, or have not, been schooled in noticing? What are the consequences of the sorts of information or enquiry we privilege over those that we don’t?

As somebody once said, all problems look like nails if all you have is a hammer.

The International Congress continues. http://www.coachingpsychologycongress.org/