On Putting Things Together | .

I often find myself work­ing with teams — or at least I would say, with groups. Smart peo­ple with good inten­tions oper­at­ing col­lec­tive­ly. Peo­ple capa­ble and often far more than just capa­ble, who want the best for their orga­ni­za­tions and work hard every­day to get there. How­ev­er, as a pro­po­nent of reflec­tive lead­er­ship I also often notice some­thing that appears in the back­ground of their meetings:

• The dom­i­nance of asser­tion: state­ments more than ques­tions, or even observations
• More con­ver­sa­tion about what’s wrong with an idea than what’s right with it
• If not by actu­al­ly talk­ing over one anoth­er, then by the imme­di­ate stack­ing of one opin­ion upon anoth­er with no breath­ing room or silence between state­ments or between speak­ers. Silence seems to be viewed oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly rather than as a resource for reflection
• Some peo­ples’ points are sim­ply ignored, spo­ken over or bypassed
• Bare­ly a momen­t’s praise for any­one or any­one else’s idea, let alone fur­ther curios­i­ty about it
• It some­times seems that one’s “seat at the table” is best jus­ti­fied by hav­ing the last word
• It can feel like peo­ple are com­pet­ing but it’s unclear what they are com­pet­ing for, per­haps cred­i­bil­i­ty more than any­thing else
• Some peo­ple say almost noth­ing; oth­er peo­ple say almost everything

I con­fess some­times I am one of the peo­ple who is not say­ing much, even as the con­sul­tant, because there’s so lit­tle explo­ration of mean­ing going on. It can feel like the group cul­ture con­tains an implic­it demand that peo­ple “push into” the con­ver­sa­tion and “mix it up,” to advo­cate a “bet­ter” solu­tion — although this may be the very oppo­site of what’s need­ed as peo­ple race to plant their par­tic­u­lar flags. In what I would call more gen­er­ous groups, there may not be so much inter­est in whose idea pre­vails but there may cer­tain­ly be an inter­est in prov­ing one’s indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tion, show­ing the val­ue of one’s pres­ence in the room and jus­ti­fies my belong­ing. That ends up amount­ing to very near­ly the same thing — a focus on the best thought, the best answer, the win­ning idea.

A more reflec­tive approach would be dif­fer­ent. “Shared mean­ing” sug­gests not so much the pro­duc­tion of a best idea as some­thing that involves a group’s deep­er need for align­ment, coher­ence, an under­stand­ing that serves as a bridge between peo­ple. Some­thing that is the prod­uct of more than dis­cus­sion, a term that comes from latin words for break­ing things apart. I’m not sure we have a word that yet quite describes the oppo­site: putting things togeth­er in a deep­er, cre­ative, col­lab­o­ra­tive way. Yet even col­lab­o­ra­tion may not be that word, the notion of co-labor­ing bring­ing to mind only hors­es in a harness.

You have to be quite inten­tion­al in some meet­ings in order to say:

“That was beau­ti­ful. Why don’t we take a moment to reflect on what Mary just said.”

or

“I’m not sure every­one is in this con­ver­sa­tion yet. Let’s slow down a moment. Who would like to be heard?”

or

“I’d like to real­ly under­stand more about what you are say­ing and I’m curi­ous about the expe­ri­ences behind your per­spec­tive. Help me get what you mean by.…”

or

“I’m hav­ing a hard time get­ting my thoughts out onto this table. I’m afraid all you’ll hear is ‘word sal­ad,’ but I’m will­ing to try and please help as I may fumble.”

More than any­thing, I find less reflec­tive, com­pet­i­tive con­ver­sa­tions to be based in over­ac­tive, intel­lec­tive, inchoate analy­sis with lit­tle atten­tion to the under­ly­ing, some­times very pri­vate feel­ings and expe­ri­ence of the peo­ple who are in the room. It’s fre­quent­ly about judg­ment that cuts things short and in so doing may actu­al­ly avoid the deep­er prob­lems that reside there, just slight­ly off stage.

Admit­ted­ly, this is an old top­ic. It’s been ref­er­enced over the years by var­i­ous authors, such as Peter Sen­ge and Peter Koesten­baum. Sen­ge, for exam­ple, calls out how typ­i­cal­ly there’s lit­tle pen­e­trat­ing exam­i­na­tion of our under­ly­ing assump­tions as we go about our prob­lem-solv­ing. And Koesten­baum in his mas­ter­piece of reflec­tive inquiry writes about a group of engi­neers who con­stant­ly argued and got nowhere until they were asked to replace the word “prob­lem” with “pain.” Essen­tial­ly, they were asked to slow down their con­ver­sa­tions enough to share how they tru­ly felt about their prob­lems before try­ing to address them.

I often notice sim­i­lar dynam­ics. In many teams no one is like­ly to say, “I’m real­ly angry about this” or “I feel guilty about what hap­pened” or “I’m so sad this has come up again” or “I was per­son­al­ly embar­rassed by the whole thing and I’d like us to do bet­ter.” Feel­ings that help the mem­bers of a team under­stand where their col­leagues and their ideas and judg­ments are tru­ly com­ing from. Instead, about the only emo­tion that ever gets voiced is “I’m frus­trat­ed.” Frus­tra­tion appears to be the only pro­fes­sion­al­ly accept­able word for an uncom­fort­able feel­ing. The rest can seem more or less taboo, per­haps inter­pret­ed as a sign of weak­ness or vulnerability.

Mean­ing hard­ly ever comes from bang­ing on our prob­lems accord­ing to their obvi­ous sur­face facets, deper­son­al­ized and abstract­ed from how we tru­ly feel about and expe­ri­ence them. We’ll be bang­ing on this same prob­lem next year, too. Mean­ing isn’t in our con­trol in that eas­i­ly glossed way, I don’t think, although some fre­quent­ly pre­tend it is, con­tin­u­ing to push the assump­tion that with enough raw log­i­cal intel­li­gence all prob­lems can be solved (a dan­ger­ous accel­er­ant for over-reliance on AI). Mean­ing may well be deep­er down, sub­merged in the unex­am­ined con­nec­tions between us, between you and me. Some days it can seem to be there still wait­ing in the con­fer­ence room long after we’ve all left for home. Tru­ly it is in us and between us, not some­place “out there” to be pos­sessed alone by a stark vic­tor who first and fore­most has won a prize for being right. Too often our sub­tly com­pet­i­tive meet­ings, meet­ings of good peo­ple try­ing to do the right things, may inad­ver­tent­ly work to strip us and our prob­lems of real mean­ing, doing so with­out, of course, any­one mean­ing to do any­thing of that kind. 

What then are we sup­posed to do? 

Well, things often change when peo­ple become con­scious. Notic­ing the dynam­ic as a pat­tern of how we do things can help — if it leads to con­struc­tive group reflec­tion. In addi­tion — and I hope you won’t hear this as too moon­struck — I’d say it’s good to remem­ber that as indi­vid­u­als we come from a lov­ing noth­ing­ness and we’ll all be head­ed back that way soon enough. It’s good to recall that we are just here togeth­er. That all we’ve got ini­tial­ly is human con­nect­ed­ness. That we’ve hap­pened to show up in the same room at the same time and yet our indi­vid­ual trips to that room have all been the prod­uct of very dif­fer­ent paths. That mean­ing is cre­at­ed but also dis­cov­ered. That we start as much from what we don’t know as what we do. And it’s about the agency we hold togeth­er, what we can do, we can build, we can put togeth­er in the face of the dark­ness accord­ing to our vision, our com­mon star wher­ev­er it may be; inevitably how we can help and care for each oth­er, defin­ing our humanity.

It’s good to remem­ber we come from that noth­ing­ness, to be aware that the noth­ing is there under us all. Some days you can almost hear it hum.