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| Toward Seeing and Being Together: An Interview with Tracy Huston |
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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.
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| Workshops Enhance 2007 Pegasus Conference Experience |
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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
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Save $100 off a one-day session or $200 off a
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Call us at 1-800-272-0945 to discuss team
registration options.
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| Giving Up Your Soul Is Bad Business |
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 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.
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New Tools for Co-Creating Healthy Futures |
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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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