The Wound that Wants to be Whole

In guatemala, I observed this generative dance in a beautiful and terrible context. Guatemala had, from 1960 to 1996, the longest-running and most brutal civil war in Latin America. Even the torture instructors hired from Argentina were appalled by what they witnessed. Out of a total population of 7 million, more than 200,000 people were "disappeared" ( killed ), and more than 1 million were forcibly displaced. The Guatemalan state was responsible for almost all of this violence, and they directed almost all of it against the country's indigenous people, the Mayans.

The official, internationally supported investigation of this period was the "Commission for Historical Clarification." Their report is appalling to read. It documents the use of terror, torture, kidnappings, child soldiers, a militarized police, arbitrary executions, rape, and semi-official death squads; the closing of political spaces, weakening of social organizations, and denial of justice ; massacres and genocide. Guatemala exhibited the most extreme possible version of the apartheid syndrome.

In 1996, after ten years of negotiations, the government and the guerrillas signed a set of Peace Accords. Guatemalans started to sweep up the broken pieces and rebuild their lives and their country. With energy and creativity, they launched initiatives to repair the shattered society. Amidst the destruction, they started to seed a new, more open and hopeful future. Guatemala is a country of extremes and bright colors: the worst and best of humanity in one landscape.

One of these rebuilding initiatives was Visi ³n Guatemala. It was inspired by Mont Fleur and intended to support the implementation of the Peace Accords. Its members were academics , business and nongovernmental organization leaders , former guerrillas and military officers, government officials, human rights activists, journalists , national and local politicians , clergy, trade unionists, and young people. I was awestruck by this team's talking and listening and by what, over the years that followed, they produced.

Their first workshop was held in 1998 at a hotel in the highlands, four hours from the capital, beside Lake Atitl n, in the shadow of the Toliman volcano. It started awkwardly and formally . The participants were deeply mistrustful of one another. Project director Elena Diez Pinto later recalled to researchers from the Society for Organizational Learning:

When I arrived at the hotel for lunch before the start of the initial meeting, the first thing I noticed was that the indigenous people were sitting together. The military guys were sitting together. The human rights group was sitting together. I thought, "They are not going to speak to each other." In Guatemala, we have learned to be very polite. We are so polite that we say "Yes" but think "No." I was worried that we would be so polite that the real issues would never emerge.

After lunch, the team moved into the meeting room. They moved their chairs into a circle, and each person presented an object that for them symbolized the current reality of Guatemala. This exercise immediately plunged us into a bewildering panorama of perspectives: a cob of corn, a staple food, and the seeds for more food, out of which, according to Mayan legend, humanity was formed ; several pieces of traditional woven clothing, made up of many bright colors of wool, representing the country's diverse ethnic groups; a stone, representing Mother Earth; a photo of someone's five-year-old daughter ; two copies of the Peace Accords; a poster of Myrna Mack, an anthropologist who had been assassinated for conducting research on people displaced by the war.

The meeting continued in this vein, with a series of sessions aimed at uncovering the complex reality of Guatemala. Even a simple listening exercise"After lunch, go for a one- hour walk outside with someone you haven't spoken with yet"produced excitement and revelation. After decades of terror and fragmentation, the participants were delighted with the opportunity simply to talk openly with one another. One team member later commented on the surprise and impact of these interactions:

We are unaware of the great richness in others. We do not see it. There is a lot, quite a lot, to learn from people who, frankly speaking, one would never have considered as possible sources of learning.

Another team member had this to say:

The first round in the first session was extremely negative because we were all looking back to the events of recent years, which had left a deep imprint on us. A first moment full of pessimism was generated. Suddenly, a young man stood up and questioned our pessimism in a very direct manner. This moment marked the beginning of an important change, and we continually referred to it afterwards. That a young man would suddenly call us "old pessimists" was an important contribution.

After dinner on the second day, we gathered to tell stories. This session was riveting and moving. We heard many stories about the civil war. Businesswoman Helen Mack Chang was the sister of Myrna Mack, who in 1990 had been assassinated by the military in broad daylight . Helen told the story of how she had run, furious, from government office to government office trying to find out why her sister had been killed. In the workshop that evening, she addressed her story firmly and calmly to the man sitting next to her in the circlethe same army officer, from the feared G2 intelligence unit, who had been on duty that day and who had lied to her and told her that he knew nothing.

The next morning the plenary session was open for anyone to speak. Often, after having slept on the previous day's conversations, participants bring up new and significant matters. I was relaxed , present, open, and curious , listening for what might come up, not expecting anything in particular. A man named Ronalth Ochaeta said he had a story that he wanted to tell. Ochaeta was the director of the Guatemalan Archdiocesan Human Rights Office, which was documenting the atrocities of the civil war.

Ochaeta had gone to a Mayan village to witness the exhumation of a mass graveone of manyfrom a massacre. When the earth had been removed, he noticed a number of small bones. He asked the forensics team if people had had their bones broken during the massacre. No, the grave contained the corpses of women who had been pregnant. The small bones belonged to their fetuses.

When Ochaeta finished telling his story, the team was completely silent. I had never heard a story like this. I was struck dumb. I had no idea what to say or do, so I said and did nothing. I looked around the circle and caught the eye of an old man, who simply nodded at me slowly. The silence lasted a long time, perhaps five minutes. Then it ended, and we took a break.

This silence had an enormous impact on the group. In interviews years later, many members of the team referred to it. In the words of one member:

The group gained the possibility of speaking frankly. Things could be said without upsetting the other party. I believe this helped to create a favorable atmosphere in which to express, if not the truth, certainly each person's truth. This, I believe, was finally achieved. In the end, and particularly after listening to Ochaeta's story, I understood and felt in my heart all that had happened . And there was a feeling that we must struggle to prevent this from happening again.

Another member put it this way:

That was one story, and there must be a thousand like it. What happened in this country was brutal ... But we were aware of it! I was! I was a politician for a long time and this was one of the areas that I worked in. I was even threatened by the military on account of my political work. We suffered, but as opponents, as enemies, always from our particular point of view. As far as I am concerned , the workshops helped me understand this in its true human dimension. A tremendous brutality! I was aware of it but had not experienced it. It is one thing to know about something and keep it as statistical data, and another to actually feel it ... And I think that all of us had to go through this process. I think that, after understanding this, everyone was committed to preventing it from happening again.

Another remembered the impact of the silence:

His testimony was sincere, calm and serene, without a trace of hate in his voice. This gave way to the moment of silence that, I would say, lasted at least one minute. It was horrible! A very moving experience for all ... If you ask any of us, we would say that this moment was like a large communion. No one dared break the silence.

Another also emphasized the power of silence:

Silence has an incredible capacity to bond. You simply remain silent and nobody has to say anything. We're there, all of us together.

At the end of that session, I made what was for me an uncharacteristic comment: "I felt there was spirit in the room." Afterwards, a young Mayan man came up to me: "Why were you surprised that there was a spirit in the room? Don't you know that today is our Day of the Spirits?" I never understood exactly what he meant , except that whatever had happened during those five minutes was more familiar to him than it was to me.

A second workshop was held two months after the first, in which the team continued with their work of uncovering the reality of Guatemala. Historians offered alternative stories of Guatemala's recent past. A panel of businessmen and economists explained the challenges of national development in the context of globalizing markets. Three Mayan scholars talked about indigenous cosmology and culture. This session was significant because the country's Ladino (white or mestizo) minority had ignored, discriminated against, and killed people in the Mayan majority. Like most oppressed people, the Mayans were unseen, and now they were being seen.

In one session, the team engaged in a particularly difficult dialogue about the findings of the Commission for Historical Clarification. Julio Balconi, a retired army general, was struggling to get the others to understand how, during the war, he had done what he thought he had to do to defend the country. This was a perspective that many members of the team found hard to hear. Raquel Zelaya, the cabinet secretary of peace, charged with overseeing the implementation of the Peace Accords, leaned over and said to him gently, with great empathy, "I know that nobody enrolls in the military academy in order to learn how to massacre women and children."

Out of these broad and deep explorations of Guatemala's past and present, the team constructed a set of scenarios of what might happen in the future. They also constructed a vision of the future that they wanted to createnot pulled out of thin air but rooted in their now broader and deeper understanding of the reality of the system. They called their vision The Flight of the Fireflies because it described a social system not focused on the light of one messianic leader, but constructed and illuminated by the diverse contributions of everyone, including the Mayans. Part of this vision was that after so many years of nightmarish division and repression , Guatemalans would "recover their capacity to dream together." One participant put it this way:

Very few people have the privilege of collective dreaming, which is intoxicating. The fact that you can sit and begin to converge on a series of issues in which you are not just making it up, but you are actually trying to root it in reality ... and also to grasp it up with all of your strength, so that you can in fact envision what you sense. That sensation is very powerful.

The scenarios and vision were only the beginning. They were a means for the team to grasp the whole of their situation and what they needed to do about it. In the words of a university president:

What place to assign to the construction of scenarios as such? It is good that they were made, but that was not necessarily what was most important. The story of the scenarios is like the story anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky tells of a system he discovered in some South Sea islands. He found that an extremely sophisticated mechanism exists by which people from some islands travel to others and make exchanges of shells. From the point of view of economic logic, this makes no sense at all: to risk lives in very long voyages to exchange sea shells. But in the end he discovers that the shells are the great pretext to do another whole bunch of things that are the ones that really matter. I believe that the scenarios are the shells of Visi ³n Guatemala. They were the great pretext to do what we needed to do.

Lars Franklin, the United Nations Development Programme's representative in Guatemala, said that Visi ³n Guatemala could best be understood by looking at the many seeds the project planted and nurtured. These seeds included influencing the platforms of three of the major political parties; participating in the vital commissions on Historical Clarification, the monitoring of the Peace Accords, and a new Fiscal Pact; and contributing to a constitutional amendment campaign, a national antipoverty program, several municipal development strategies, and the reform of both primary school and university curricula. "Visi ³n Guatemala is," one team member said, "a parable of the best that can happen in this country."

A government member of Visi ³n Guatemala was reflective:

I don't know how much of what has been happening later in Guatemala has to do with Visi ³n Guatemala ... It is difficult to assess. Visi ³n Guatemala is almost like the Apostles to whom Christ said: take up your cross and follow me. It hasn't happened through writing or radio or television. It has been a process of inner reflection.

In 2002, two years after the project had officially ended, the team held a half-day reunion. I was impressed by their level of excitement at being back together. At one of the lunch tables, four of the team members sat together, deep in conversation, each of them a presidential candidate for their party. This was a big change from their very first lunch, when each faction had sat separately. Team members had launched several influential new cross-boundary national dialogue groups: one among organizations of the highly fragmented left, another among indigenous organizations, and another among politicians from the twenty different political parties. They had sponsored 200 municipal dialogues (in two- thirds of all municipalities) to address pressing local challenges. Guatemalans were substituting the open way of dialogue for the closed way of force. They were escaping the apartheid syndrome.

The coffee break that afternoon went on for more than an hour, as team members energetically compared notes, offered help, and made fresh plans. The most important result of the projectout of which all the other results flowed was this trusting web of relationships. Team members said that the project was rejuvenating the country's circulatory system, the life-giving blood vessels connecting different parts of the national body. In a country like Guatemala, where the social fabric has been shredded by conflict, problems cannot be solved until sectoral leaders are able to talk with and listen to each other. I asked one of the project's funders if he thought that his money had been well spent. He looked around at the intersectoral huddles: "This networking alone is worth the money. The most important outcome of this project is the buddy system that was established and persists. The network gets activated immediately, for quite daring initiatives. Perspectives are shared without fear. People are bonded, probably for life."

In the years since the project ended, Guatemala has been on a roller coaster. The 1999 elections brought to power the party led by General Efrain Rios Montt, who had been dictator during the worst years of the genocide. Political violence and repression returned. Against this dark backdrop, Visi ³n Guatemala and its offshoot dialogue processes were hope-generating sources of light: fireflies. Lars Franklin of the United Nations called Visi ³n Guatemala "a positive point of reference for Guatemalans who want to get things back on track." One member of the team said, "It is true that things are not going well now. But without dialogues like Visi ³n Guatemala, we would have already had a military coup." Another said, "When things go badly here, we all dig our trenches deeper. Visi ³n Guatemala gives us bridges across our trenches."

In the run-up to the 2003 elections, Rios Montt orchestrated a terrifying day of riots in Guatemala City to force electoral rules to be changed in his favor. Within two days, an extraordinarily broad coalition of political and civil society organizations had come together to protest, led by members of Visi ³n Guatemalatheir network had been activated immediately. In the elections a few months later, Rios Montt came a distant third. When the new government was formed in the beginning of 2004, one-third of the cabinet ministers were members of the team. The fireflies were flying, lit up with hope.

Katrin K ufer of the MIT Sloan School of Management led the group of researchers who interviewed members of the Visi ³n Guatemala team. She noticed that the conversations of the Visi ³n Guatemala team map closely onto Otto Scharmer's four different ways of talking and listening.

The first way is downloading: saying what we always say and not listening at all. This is what Elena Diez Pinto was worried about when she saw each group sitting separately and thought, "They're not going to talk with each other. In Guatemala ... we say 'yes' but we mean 'no.'"

The second way of listening is debating: listening fairly and objectively. This is what the Guatemalan team member was doing when he tried to "actually listen, not to be thinking mentally of how I am going to respond." Listening openly goes along with talking openly, as when "the young man called us 'old pessimists.'"

The third way is talking and listening with empathy, subjectively, from the heart: reflective dialogue. Raquel Zelaya demonstrated this when she listened and then said to General Julio Balconi, "I know that nobody enrolls in the military academy in order to learn how to massacre women and children."

The fourth way, generative dialogue, was the listening that surrounded Ochaeta's talkinglike John Milton's open left hand cupping his loosely clenched right fist. The team sensed that something important and special happened during the story-telling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. Time seemed to slow down: I wasn't sure how long the "five minutes" of silence actually lasted. The normal separation between people seemed to lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other's individual perspectives to being, for a while, a whole collective "I."

Two of the team members referred to this experience as being one of "communion." Later I told this story to Robert Stark, a Catholic priest from New Mexico who had spent a lot of time in Guatemala, and asked him how he understood the word "communion" in this context. "I recognize the experience you have described," he said, "as that palpable feeling of our deepest essences being in contact. Communion means a merging of spirit. When we break bread together, we deepen the bonds among us, and when we eat the communion bread, we become one body in Christ. Being in communion is the understanding that we are radically connected. Indigenous people like the Mayans know about this connection. In silence we can feel this connection powerfully: this is the silence of oneness."

Then I realized that I had had that experience of radical connectedness two other times. At my wedding to Dorothy, during our vows, the whole tent full of people had seemed to be one. And when I was alone in the Pyrenees, I had felt one with the immense whole of nature.

When the team had listened to Ochaeta, we were not listening with empathy towards him as an individual. He was, in fact, a peripheral member of the team. The story was not about him and he told it with little emotion. Several other people in the room could have told similar stories from their own experiences. Instead, Ochaeta's talking was a vehicle on which that critically important story entered the room and was heard by the whole team. In an empathetic conversation (as in Zelaya's with Balconi), each story is a piece of a puzzle, and such a conversation in a diverse group allows the larger picture to become visible. But in this storytelling session, each story was a hologram that contained the whole picture. In Ochaeta's story, the team glimpsed the essence of the whole Guatemalan reality that showed them what they needed to do, which one of them later summarized as: "We must struggle to prevent this from happening again."

Quantum physicist David Bohm once said that the universe is whole but we mistakenly see it as fragmented, as if we are looking in a cracked mirror. In that moment of generative dialogue, the Visi ³n Guatemala team saw the whole.

In their storytelling session, the Visi ³n Guatemala team discovered the source of their shared commitment. They had all signaled their general commitment to the project by coming to that first workshop. But their precise purpose, and the commitment they had to that purpose, only became clear to them during the five minutes of silence. This session occurred during the first meeting of the team, as if this purpose was already present, waiting to be discovered. From their glimpse of the whole of the Guatemalan situation, they knew what they had to do, even though the details of the initiatives they would take to enact the purpose only came laterjust as I knew at Mont Fleur that I had to walk through the door that was open, even though I did not know what was on the other side.

My colleagues Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers call this phenomenon "presence." In Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, they write

We've come to believe that the core capacity needed for accessing the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one's preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control ... Ultimately, we came to see all aspects of presence as leading to a state of "letting come," of consciously participating in a larger field of change. When this happens, the field shifts, and the forces shaping a situation can shift from re-creating the past to manifesting or realizing an emerging future.

At the conclusion of the Mont Fleur project, one of the team members had given me his thoughtful, qualified assessment of the project. "What we accomplished was to map out in broad terms the successful outcome. We captured the way forward of those of us committed to finding a way forward, and now we are filling it in. But I am uneasy about having compromised on things that matter to me." I had often reflected on this statement and wondered how a group could achieve a kind of agreement that went beyond a compromise.

Then at the conclusion of the Visi ³n Guatemala project, Elena Diez Pinto told me that the sacred book of the Mayan Q'iche people, called the Popol Vuh, contains the following text: "We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed, and then we decided." The Visi ³n Guatemala team's presence allowed them to achieve not merely a compromise on ideas but an agreement on purpose. This deep agreement on purpose enabled them to make their important contribution to creating a new and better future for Guatemala.

When Desmond Tutu retired as the Anglican Archbishop of Southern Africa, Njongonkulu Ndungane was elected to replace him. The thirty-two bishops who made up the regional synod were all coming to Cape Town for Ndungane's enthronement, and so he decided to convene a strategic planning workshop. He asked me to facilitate, and fearing that I would not be able to follow the Christian technicalities, I asked Dorothy to work with me. This was the first time we had worked together since Mont Fleur, and we found it a joyous experience. The meeting started and ended each day in church , praying and singing . The group had an exceptionally clear sense of their mission. They also had several long-festering issues that they needed to work through.

The bishops were extraordinarily patient and present listeners. On the first day, we were talking about ground rules for the meeting. One bishop suggested, "We must listen to one another." A second bishop said, "No, brother, that's not quite it. We must listen with empathy." Then a third said, "Brother, that's still not quite what we need. We must listen to the sacred within each of us."

When the Visi ³n Guatemala team listened to Ochaeta's story, they were listening to the sacred. They were listening, through him, to the best that could be in Guatemala and in themselves . To create new and better futures , we must listen to this highest potential in our situations, as it manifests itself within and through each of us.

I told the story of Visi ³n Guatemala to Laura Chasin, Director of Boston's Public Conversations Project, who has facilitated several deep, difficult dialogues, including an extended one between pro-choice and pro-life activists. She was silent for a while. "Your story," she said thoughtfully, "reminds me of something I learned two years ago, when my husband had a terrible accident . He was swimming in a lake and a motorboat ran over him. The propeller cut a gaping gash in his leg. We rushed him to the hospital, but the doctor said that the wound was too large to be sewn up. The only thing we could do was keep the area clean and dry. 'The two sides of the wound will reach out to each other,' the doctor said. 'The wound wants to be whole.'

"The dialogues you and I are involved in are like that," Chasin continued. "The participants and the human systems they are part of want to be whole. Our job as facilitators and leaders is simply to help create a clean, safe space. Then the healing will occur."