Closed Fist, Open Palm


The way to listen is to stop talking. One reason we cannot hear what others are saying is that their voices are drowned out by our own internal voices. We keep reacting and projecting , judging and prejudging, anticipating and expecting, reloading and drifting off. The biggest challenge of listening is quieting down our internal chatter. When we succeed in doing so, we see the world anew.

Jaworski and I were helping a team from a European multinational company that was working to turn around the dismal sales performance of their oldest and biggest division. They had been studying the situation for months, interviewing colleagues, customers, competitors , and people in other industries. We met for a three-day workshop in a small inn in the French Pyrenees. We spent the first morning analyzing the overwhelming mass of interview material. Then we walked up a nearby mountain and spread out along a ridge with magnificent views of snow-capped peaks and rocky valleys. We spent the next sixteen hours there, each with our own tent, alone and silent, without cell phones or watches or books or paper. We had no problem-solving assignment. Our guide, meditation teacher John Milton, simply asked us to relax and be fully present with what was going on inside and around us.

For my first several hours on the ridge, I was not at all relaxed or present. My mind was buzzing and hopping about with thoughts and worries about the past and the future: what I wished I'd said, what I needed to remember to do. Then, as I sat looking out at the huge vista and then later at the night sky, this buzzing within my head subsided, the ideas and worries dropped away, and I felt myself opening up to something larger and more encompassing. Then the next morning, just before we were all to meet up and descend the mountain, a few new ideas popped into my mind, from nowhere, about what we had to do next.

We descended and then returned to our workshop. We did not talk much about what had happened to us during our silence. Yet our subsequent working sessions had a radically new character. Our conversations were unusually open, honest, fluid, purposeful, and generative . The team came to a new understanding of their business problem and then quickly and easily agreed on a set of initiatives to address it.

Yet this exceptionally productive three-day conversation included one full day of not talking at all. The impact of our quiet time was not so much on the quality of our talking. Nobody came down from the mountain with an epiphany. Its impact was on the quality of our listening. By relaxing and calming down, we became better able to listen to ourselves , to each other, and to the situation and what it demanded of us.

Economist Brian Arthur, from the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity Sciences, was a guest at this workshop. We had invited him to speak to us because of a provocative comment he had made to an interviewer from Fast Company magazine:

For the big decisions in life, you need to reach a deeper region of consciousness. Making decisions then becomes not so much about "deciding" as about letting an inner wisdom emerge. We've been bamboozled into believing that cognition is rationalthat our mind is a gigantic computer, or a blackboard on which we can reach a decision by calculating pluses and minuses. Recent research on cognition shows that our minds rarely make strictly logical deductions. Instead, we rely on patternsand on feelings associated with those patterns.

At the workshop, Arthur talked to us about the process of scientific innovation that he had observed in his own work and in that of his Nobel Prize-winning biologist and physicist colleagues. He said that good scientists solve everyday problems by "lowering onto a problem" a preexisting theory (downloading), and then using that theory to calculate a solution. But this approach does not work for creating breakthroughs. For this, great scientists "camp out beside a problem," studying it assiduously and waiting for an intuitive insight. In real innovation, the "click" does not come from working on and talking about a problem, but from stepping back, giving our unconscious some space to work, and listening for an answer. This is what we had done on the mountain.

On a smaller scale, I noticed this same phenomenon while working on this book. I was at my family's home beside the beach in Cape Town. I would be stuck trying to figure out how to express an idea, and I would quit and go for a five-minute swim in the sea. By the time I got back to my desk I would know what to write. The same thing happened when I was brushing my teeth before going to bed. As soon as I retreated from the problem, a solution came.

Miha Pogacnik is an exuberant Slovenian concert violinist and a wonderful teacher of listening. With a new group of students, he plays a short piece of music and then asks them what they heard. Invariably one of the students answers, "I liked it." Pogacnik insists: "I don't care whether you liked it or didn't like it! Tell me what you heard !" He wants to teach his students to hear and to notice differences in tempo, color , mood, and energy. Our biggest impediment to hearing is our impulse to talk rather than to listen, to make a judgment rather than an observation.

Kees van der Heijden emphasized the same point when he coached us on how to conduct interviews at Shell. He wanted us to hear precisely what the interviewee was saying and to write it down without filtering or distorting it, especially when it differed from our own thinking. Van der Heijden himself was a masterfully conscientious listener. I once conducted a series of interviews sitting side-by-side with him. Afterwards, when we reviewed our two sets of notes, I was astounded at how much I had failed to hear. My prejudicesmy prejudgmentsabout what was important had distorted my ability to hear accurately what the interviewees were saying.

I am at my best as a leader and facilitator when I am relaxed and present to what is arising: when I am able to hear and help others to hear what is happening in and amongst and around us, and what I and we need to do. I fail as a leader when I am so preoccupied with what I want to make happento force to happenthat I miss what is actually happening.

In the summer of 2002, Betty Sue Flowers and I facilitated a small meeting of CEOs at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, on the social responsibility of business. In the aftermath of September 11 and Enron, the subject of trust and mutual understandingbetween companies and their stakeholders, between leaders and followers, between the United States and Europe and the Arab worldfigured prominently in our sessions. One afternoon, we drove to a beautiful valley and split up to take a one- hour solo, silent walk. Then we reconvened around a campfire to continue our conversation and to eat dinner. I was determined that in this session after our quiet walks in this uplifting setting, we would have our magical insight. The participants were relaxed, happy, and human. They had been inspired by their walks and were enjoying recounting what had come to them. But I was not satisfied. I sternly urged them to dig deeper.

Suddenly, the one Arab member of the group wildly interrupted our conversation by riding up to the campfire on a horse. He had met some men on his walk, and they had offered him a beer and let him ride one of their horses. "This is what my culture is like!" he said excitedly. My serious dialogue dissolved as the group erupted into delighted laughter . But I was so preoccupied with my disappointment at failing to manufacture magic that I was not present enough to recognize the magic that had come riding up into our group.

Harrison Owen is a pioneering facilitator who has developed a highly open and self-directed dialogue-and-action methodology called Open Space. We were corresponding about his and my approaches to process facilitation, and he wrote to me:

I wonder whether you aren't working too hard to achieve something that can happen pretty much by itself. I certainly agree that open talking and open listening and the other elements you are paying attention to are critical, but how do we get these? Twenty years with Open Space has pretty well convinced me that all of these elements are naturally occurring phenomena which happen pretty much by themselves , if given the space. Lots of chaos, confusion, and conflict, to be surebut I find that this unholy trinity has much to contribute.

If we want to help resolve complex problem situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves.

By this time, my work on solving tough problems was focused comfortably on opening up my listening and helping others do the same. Then John Milton, the meditation and martial arts teacher who had guided the group in the Pyrenees, said something that brought me up short. All of a sudden, I realized that my focus was seriously unbalancedthat I was missing half of the story.

It was at the end of a Tai Chi lesson. Milton bowed to us with his hands held in a way I had never seen before. His right hand was curled into a fist and it was cupped by his left hand. Afterwards, I asked him what this meant . "This is an ancient mudra or sacred hand gesture," he said. "The right hand, in a loosely clenched fist, represents the yang, the masculine. In the classical Chinese text, The I Ching, or Book of Changes, it is called 'The Creative.' The left hand, which softly holds the right, represents the yin, the feminine, and is called 'The Receptive."' Then he smiled at me. "The right hand represents open talking. The fist is not clenched tightly: you should be able to pull a pencil through it. It represents talking with, not talking at. And the left hand represents open listening."

Most of us need to work even harder on opening up our listening than on opening up our talking. But we can't solve tough problems through listening alonejust as we can't solve them through talking alone. If we want to create new realities, we need to listen and be, but we also need to talk and act. Open listening and open talking are yin and yang, two parts of the same whole, two movements in the same generative dance .




Solving Tough Problems(c) An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
Solving Tough Problems(c) An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 53

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