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April 2007, Issue 85

 

In This Issue
  • New Tools for Co-Creating Healthy Futures
  • Toward Seeing and Being Together: An Interview with Tracy Huston
  • Workshops Enhance 2007 Pegasus Conference Experience
  • Giving Up Your Soul Is Bad Business

  • Toward Seeing and Being Together: An Interview with Tracy Huston
    Tracy Huston

    Tracy Huston is a consultant and co-founder of Menlo Lab, a network of practitioners and consultants dedicated to supporting social innovation in local communities. In anticipation of her upcoming forum at the Pegasus Conference and the release of her first book, Inside Out (published by SoL this month), she recently spoke with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert about how her unique approach to whole systems change has been shaped by her background in theater and recent collaboration with Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute.

    LP: Earlier in your career you directed an improv group for the former Boston Shakespeare Company. What took you from there to the corporate world?

    TH: I worked both in theater and as a fiction writer. For me, stories, whether on the printed page or in performances, were really about exploring the human experience in all its messy and wonderful complexity. My current work is no different. It's looking at the complexities of emotional and relational experience in corporate or community contexts and trying to understand the forces at play in shaping our behaviors and actions.

    I see work as an essentially creative process where the intention, whether it's explicit or not, is to discover what we can create together that's beautiful and has real value. That's the connecting thread that led me, now so much later in life, to go back and look at ensemble methods. These techniques involve groups of people enacting a shared play, despite having very different rules, perceptions, and goals. You can see the relevance in a work context of understanding the individual and relational capacities that are needed to perform as an ensemble.

    LP: Tell us how you use these ideas of story and ensemble in your work.

    TH: The primary challenge in any human system--especially in a multi-stakeholder system where people come from different industries or different sectors in a community--is that we each see reality through our own lens, and our perceptions are different. To enable effective ensemble work in improv, you have to create a space where people can see the situation as a whole. Story weaving is one method we use to get everyone seeing the whole picture. We start with individual perceptions about the current situation that reflect the emotional, relational, spiritual, and practical experiences of each of the people involved. Then we take all those different stories and weave them together into a single narrative. Without creating this shared space, it would be hard to embrace a common vision or reach agreement on what actions we want to take.

    Stories give you a container for conflict and difference. We don't all have to come to consensus, but we can at least have a shared story that holds both agreement and diversity of opinion. When people disagree, we tend to want to reach consensus and throw out any opinions that don't fit. But a perception doesn't die just because you don't take action on it, right? The story weaving process allows you to validate multiple perspectives.


    Workshops Enhance 2007 Pegasus Conference Experience

    Space is limited for these separately priced workshops, open to the general public. Register before May 31 to save up to $200 and secure your seat.

    Enhance your conference experience by applying the reflection, conversation, or scenario-thinking skills you've learned in a one- or two-day workshop before the conference begins. Or stay through the week to round out your learnings with an introduction to systems-based facilitation techniques.

    PRE01 - The Art of Hosting and Convening Conversations in Organizations and Communities
    Saturday/Sunday, November 3-4, 9:00-5:00;
    $1195 until May 31

    Chris Corrigan, Tim Merry, Teresa Posakony, and Tenneson Woolf, The Art of Hosting
    Learn and practice a variety of scalable approaches to transformation that are rooted in conversation. Learn more...

    PRE02 - The U-Process: From Theory to Practice
    Sunday, November 4, 9:00-5:00; $795 until May 31

    LeAnne Grillo and Joe McCarron, Generon Consulting
    Practice the capacities needed to navigate the U- Process from sensing, through presencing, to realizing. Learn more...

    PRE03 - Mastering Uncertainty
    Sunday, November 4, 9:00-5:00; $795 until May 31

    Eamonn Kelly and Kristin Cobble, Global Business Network
    Understand the factors contributing to today's escalating uncertainty, and identify new approaches to help deepen your organization's competency in mastering it. Learn more...

    POST01 - Facilitation Tools for Improving Organizational Effectiveness
    Thursday/Friday, November 8-9, 9:00-5:00;
    $1195 until May 31

    Kristina Wile and Gregory Hennessy, Systems Thinking Collaborative
    Gain hands-on experience with a variety of facilitation tools including hexagon mapping, systems archetypes, causal loop diagrams, options mapping, and scenario planning. Learn more...

    Save $100 off a one-day session or $200 off a two-day session when you register for a workshop by May 31!

    Call us at 1-800-272-0945 to discuss team registration options.


    Giving Up Your Soul Is Bad Business

    by Tácito Nobre

    During tough times, companies tend to give up their souls. Workers put aside who they truly are, what they most care about, and what they really want to create. They begin to do things they would have condemned in the past, all in the name of accomplishing short-term results. However, tension increases, and commitment, energy, and creativity all decline. Fear becomes the dominant emotion--the main source of energy and the impetus to action.

    Businesses can learn a lot from sports and the arts in this regard. Ask an athlete what usually happens when she mentally repeats "Can't miss" or "Can't fail" before or during a performance versus repeating "I'll make it" or "I'll get it." Thinking about what you want to create works much better than thinking about what you want to avoid.

    High-performing sports teams sometimes find themselves "in the zone," where they experience peak performance. I have seen several groups experience this special kind of connection. The precipitating factor was that people talked openly and listened deeply--or talked and listened from the heart. And as many ancient cultures believed, the heart leads directly to the soul.

    As Joseph Jaworski says, "Anyone who walks into a locker room of a championship team can feel the energy, the excitement, the mutual trust and the extraordinary sense of the possible." Why can't you feel the same when entering your office? It can be this way, as long as you bring your soul along for the ride.


    New Tools for Co-Creating Healthy Futures

    Inside Out
    by Tracy Huston

    In this engaging book, Tracy Huston builds on U-theory by exploring approaches for developing the personal, relational, and systemic conditions needed to support leaders in collaborating to create the future they want. Drawing from her work in multi-stakeholder change initiatives, as well as from a variety of "ensemble" practices employed in the arts, Huston offers a rich mix of stories, cases, and practical methods for generating and sustaining whole system change, from the "inside-out."

    paperback, 157 pp, $15
    Order

    NEW from Pegasus!

    Living and Leading on the Developing Edge
    by Roger Saillant

    How do you build a corporate culture that acts with the greatest respect for future generations?

    In this heartfelt presentation, Plug Power CEO Roger Saillant describes four operating principles that have helped him continuously foster this fundamental value in a successful career that has taken him from the competitive arena of the automotive industry to the front lines of the renewable energy revolution. In stories drawn from his experience with launching and managing manufacturing plants in cultures around the globe, he describes the community-centered practices that have enabled him to expand his own circle of personalization--with some extraordinary results.

    DVD, NTSC, color, 55 minutes, $79
    Order
    View Clip





    "The universe is made of stories, not atoms."

    -Muriel Rukeyser


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