Nancy Love’s Weblog

Creative Seekers live on Differentiation BEACH.  They ..

1. Believe that they are the only special person.

2. Expect that others will let them do their own thing and recognize their unique needs and contributions

3. Assume that everyone else has to follow the rules

4. Are Concerned about aesthetics and being different, no matter what

5. Hope that their creativity will make the world prettier.

Creative Seekers take energy from being sad and burdened.  They are often melancholy, wishing for a different present that is based on a different past… If only….  They are artists who turn pain and suffering into creative works when they are healthy and can be reclusive and depressed when they are not.  Creative Seekers add beauty to the world even as they recreate them selves and their appearances each day.

On Connection BEACH everyone helps each other.  There is a strong sense of team and belonging.  When the weather is good love and friendship abound.  When the wind changes there is a sense of foreboding as Love’s strings attach to every act.  People who live on Connection BEACH

1. Believe that helping others is the most important thing that they can do.

2. Expect that others will acknowledge their contribution and return the love.

3. Assume that everyone has something to offer and may just need a little help from them to reach their full potential.

4. Concern themselves with other people’s business often to the neglect of their own needs.

5. Hope that you will always need them.

Ambiguityis my friend.  I live there as we all do.  The gift is knowing that ambiguity is your friend.  Certainty gets you just that … certainty … or disappointment when the certainty turns out to be ambiguous.

Mediations are the kind of conversations that rely on ambiguity and in fact as a mediator it is my job to create an ambiguous past, present and future that can be reconstructed as positive.  Doubts, questions and information are my friend.

Ambiguity is also my friend as I write.  Not knowing is liberating what you don’t can bring confidence to the writer.  Knowing what you don’t know brings curiousity.  Knowing what you know brings the courage to say it so it can be tested and you can learn as others contribute to your knowing.

Ambiguity is not to be confused with ambivalence.  Ambivalence has a tone of disinterest whereas ambiguity is more about living comfortably in a place of not knowing.  For me it is comfortable.  For others it is madness to be comfortable not knowing.  For me it is opportunity and anticipation and for others it is unsafe and unnecessarily risky.

Ambiguity is my friend and so when I am asked what I know for sure I am confident with a response like “nothing”  or “42”  for you Douglas Adams fans.

Today we all moved our lives forward, toward our goals and toward the end.  Today we loved, lived, laughed and left our legacy.  Today we are involved in our lives making choices even if that means choosing not to choose which of course is also a choice.  We have two days – today and tomorrow.  Today we do what we can to get ourselves ready for tomorrow.

And, as we have often been told, tomorrow never comes.  It is illusive.  We are anticpating tomorrow ever day, waiting to see what it will bring and how it will work out and in the meantime we waste the time we have today to get AROUND to doing what we want to do tomorrow.  Now is all we have.

So tomorrow I am going to Canmore to write.  I am excited and looking forward to the opportunity to spend time in quiet contemplation and creativity.  I feel a little like a kid in the candy store.  There is so much writing to choose from.  I have started so many projects that need my undivided attention for  a day or so.  How do I choose?

I could work on the PULSE BEACHS – the Frames of Reference that people  use in a conversation.  I have many thoughts on the BEACHs that I would like to share.  I would write about each of them in turn – Perfection, Connection, Success, Differentiation, Detachment, Security, Excitement, Power, Peace and what the world looks like from this perspective where people are motivated by these and are seeking to satisfy a need.  Not everyone is on the BEACH for the same reason and the weather can change depending on the strength of the motivation and  the purpose.  Deconstructing the BEACHs would be a labour of love and I will get around to it …. tomorrow.

I could write more about the complex PULSE, the foundational theory that makes PULSE work.  I am excited by the images of floating triangles and tetrahedron and sharing my insight on why conversations move through the Frame to sustainable resolution in such a consistent way.

I could write about Principals leading mandated change.  The stories of five principals is coming together nicely and needs a finishing touch and an edit to pull it all together.  It would be nice to get that one to press.

I could work on the leadership catalogue that we have been working on so that I will have it to take with me to DC next week.  It is an exciting project, pulse – ifying the delivery of awesome materials related to leadership from many sources.  The catalogue has nine categories of leadership skill developing seminars that will be available as one hour web-casts.

I could work on a white paper to show the use of the PULSE Frame for the regeneration of my favourite federal political party.  I would love to have the time to devote to an explanation of my BIG IDEA for bringing a party from the ashes to its former glory and beyond.

I could write about the skills that power the PULSE Frame.  I have always wanted to spend quality time explaining in more detail each of the twenty skills that PULSE Practitioners use to guide the conversation.  Examining the work of the delta during the PULSE conversation would give everyone more insight into how it all works.

I could do an in depth look at the six freedoms that the PULSE Frame is described and constructed to release for people.  I want to examine the freedom to choose from the past; to act in the present and to dream of a future together.  I want to understand how people experience being known in community, being heard and being positive and how the skills of the delta encourage the sense of freedom that liberates people to make better decisions together then they might apart  becuase they own them.

I could write about a PULSE Plan and how to arrive at it.  I could expound on each of the five pieces of the PULSE Frame.   I could do so many things and I know that I must choose.  There are just not enough hours in either today or tomorrow to get it all done.

Today we can only move one day closer to reaching the goals, forward toward the end, deliberately choosing to act and to dream, to be known and heard and to be positive.  Life is a PULSE Conversation.

Spring and Easter are a time of rebirth and renewal.  Although it is snowing here in Calgary today, I know that somewhere there is spring and it will arrive here in due course.  Calgary is like that.  The weather is unpredictable and the time of year is basically irrelevant.  It can snow in any month and it can be t-shirt weather in any month.  Maybe that is why I like it here.  It is unpredictable … like people.  My latest reading material is called “Predictable Irrationality”.  I am thinking the weather in Calgary is beyond that although way to Rationally Unpredictable.

The book by Dan Ariely is a great read about why people do people things … again and again and again.  The sub title is “The hidden forces that shape our decisions“.  The stories are great and really make you think about the things that make you go “Hmmmmm”.  Those stories and the beginning of a documentary I heard on CBC about Positive Ppsychology are swirling in my head looking for meaning.  The Positive Ppsychology piece began with a reminder that the brains we have today are the ones who survived in the dangerous times of our predecessors who had to fight off wild animals and hunt for food to survive.  The ones who were skeptical, cautious and fierce were the ones who survived and breed to create later generations.  Those characteristics are not always helpful these days where food is readily available and our neighbour is our friend not our competition.  So the skills in a land of scarcity are not easily translated to a land of plenty.  We are still acting as if we do not know where the next meal is coming from when there is a fast food restaurant on ever corner.  We are negative assume-rs because our ancestors survived in the wild.  Hmmmmm.

Sooo Does our ppredictable irrationality come from that evolution of the brain that has not quite caught up to our society and our communities? Could it explain why we seek busyness and activity rather than wisdom?  Is busyness our badge of honour in a society that values time?  Is it peculiar to North America?  Does Europe have a more civilized approach where leisure or time to live instead of time to earning a living  is the thing that is the measure of success? Does that make Eurpoe more evolved than North America?  So many questions to guide this weeks entries.  TTFN

Tonight I had the honour of presenting a quick 40 minute session on leadership to the members of Calgary’s BPW – Business and Professional Women’s Group.  “Women working for working women”.  It was a fun session.  We started with an exercise where each table had to come to consensus around a work that described leadership that began with one of the letters in LEADERSHIP.  Once assembled we talked about the aspects of leadership that were used to complete the sentence …”Leadership is ….” AND we talked about you can add “or not” to the end of each of the sentences and it is still true.  Leadership is listening … or not.  Leadership is evolution … or not.  Leadership is awareness … or not.  Leadership is determination …. or not.  Each of the words used to describe what leadership is can be used to describe what leadership is when it is absent.  hmmmm … sooooo leadership is truly situational as Mary Parker Follett said many years ago.

Part of the learning for that exercise was the debrief on how the groups had come to consensus.  Who emerged as the leaders?  How many leadership attempts were ignored?  Which ones were accepted and why? In a room full of leaders the styles and approaches were varied and informative.  The three kinds of leaders emerged.  Head, Heart and Body people show up as leaders who are fixated on future, past or present.  It is always interesting to notice what happens in groups when a task like this is assigned.  It is an opportunity to see your self as a leader …. or not.

Next we did an exercise where everyone was asked to thin of and identify a leader in their personal lives, their professional lives, in public live and someone that saw them as a leader.  Everyone shared with someone else their choices and why they were their choices. We debriefed how our choices say alot about who we are as leaders.  We choose people with the same values as we have to be our leaders and role models.

We also talked about how the work of a leader occurs in conversation.  The skills of conversation are vital to a leader, a core competency as I have mentioned before.  We talked about the two kinds of conversations that leaders have; the responsibility conversation and the accountability conversation and how both rely on a clear understanding of the past, the present and the future impact of acceptance and non-compliance.

It was a fun, interactive evening with bright women who are building leadership capacity.  Thank you BPW!  It was a pleasure.

In high conflict situations there is always a resolution lurking.  My job as mediator is to assist the parties to find the missing piece that will unlock the resolution.  Dialogue unlocks the mystery.  As people think together the future becomes obvious.  As mediator, I use a structured conversation approach that is guided by specific question about the past, the present and the future.  In hundreds of mediation I have seen many people locked in conflict who, given the right atmosphere and encouragement, can find their own resolution once all of the information pertaining to the case is disclosed.  Creating an atmosphere where parties are willing to lay their cards on the table face up is the key.  I have been working with clients and with future and experienced mediators on techniques to create that atmosphere for the past ten years.  Although each situation is different, there is a formula that works for bringing people together, even when it seems impossible that they can agree on anything.

Funk and Wagnalls’ 1974 edition of the Standard Desk Dictionary defines ‘deference’ as “submission or yielding to the will, opinions, etc. of another or respectful regard“. I have added the italics and I am grateful that at my mother’s house there is always a dictionary handy.  That is not surprising when you know that crosswords are a daily ritual here and scrabble is the game of choice.

Okay, so what about deference and “respectful regard” is dangerous?  I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest volume – Outliers – and I am intrigued by his discussion of mitigated speech and Power Distance Index from Hofestede’s dimensions.  It is a fascinating discussion that brings home in spades the significance of the GHOST protocol in Conversation.

In GHOST we use Gentle rather than respectful because we knew from experience that out of respect people hold things back.  We also understood that some cultural groups were more ‘respectful’ than others and that was creating imbalances in the mediated conversations we saw.  Hofestede’s work – Culture’s Consequences – explains what we saw and affirms our choice of ‘Gentle’ rather than ‘respectful’ as part of our protocol for conversation in a way that many will understand.

Deference, not saying what is on your mind out of respectful regard, is dangerous.  It is in fact life threatening in the cockpit situations described by Gladwell.  I have encountered many conversations that I know the truth was being massaged or mitigated in order to save face.  It is what we do and we are more likely to do it if we are from certain cultures or certain families.

One of the questions that Hofestede asked in his research was: “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their manager?”  From my experience, when the answer is frequently, “There be Dragons”.  When employees are afraid to disagree then an unhealthy, even toxic, environment leads to lost productivity and increased costs.

I want to relate this too to a radio broadcast I heard on CBC Edmonton yesterday.  The report was about theft.  Shop lifting in the US was reported to have cost retailers $16 billion.  Theft in the work place was pegged at $600 billion. HMMM.  Behavioural scientists were reporting that compensation was not a factor when it came to who might steal from their employer.  It was more a matter or how connected people felt, how valued they felt in the organization and how loyal they were to the organization all of which depended on each other.

So it seems that PDI – Power Distance Index- which tells you how much deference is paid to people in the hierarchy and therefore can predict how much deference is occurring may be related to how much the organization is losing through theft and sabotage.  And all because people are speaking and listening to each other without a FRAME.

Learning how to speak and listen Gently and Honestly; learning how to be Open to the others point of view even if you are in a leadership position and allowing that point of view to influence yours; learning how to use specific examples and language for clarity and talking, saying what is on your mind is vital.  It may have saved lives in the scenarios that Gladwell describes between pilot and co-pilot and saved millions of dollars spent on replacing those items that were pilfered in organizations across the US.