PERCEPTION: RESTORING SANITY

A Tale of Two Stories

One of the key lenses into an organization’s leadership and culture is how it deals with crises. What happens when something goes wrong or the leaders feel under attack? In these moments, the organization’s real values become startlingly visible. Do leaders panic and scramble to get out of a tough situation, forgetting principles and values? Or do they take the time to work with the crisis, engaging their members fully, relying on their history, values, and principles—that is, their identity? Only in the latter case is it possible to create the strong social fabric that enables an institution to move confidently into its desired future.

I want to share with you two stories that helped me understand an important role for leaders when a crisis arises. They both are strong examples of how to work well with life’s dynamics of identity, self-organization, and perception. In both cases, I wasn’t aware of this critical leadership role of actively dealing with perceptions until I heard the stories.

The Gift and The Firestorm

I observed the behavior described here in real time while I was working with the president of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA), Dr. Stephanie Pace Marshall. Stephanie was the founding president for the country’s first three-year residential school for students talented in science and math. Founded in 1985, long before STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) became the top priority for schools, I watched up close as these educators, working in a self-organizing environment, pioneered many educational innovations that have since become common practice: problem-based learning; inquiry-based science; integrated science. Stephanie, like all the wise leaders I know, worked from a clear theory of action. She knew not only what to do but why to do it.²⁹

And she kept developing that theory in her day-to-day leadership. She became a clear guiding voice for how to create educational environments that generate learning and motivation in all children. Her consistent vision has been to liberate the goodness and genius of all children, for the world. She has supported thousands of educators to create life-affirming, generative learning environments.

In August of one year, the head of admissions came to her with a terrible error—they had mistakenly admitted thirty-two children who were on the waiting list. The director wanted to immediately write to them and tell them their acceptance had been a mistake, but Stephanie would have none of that. Referencing their values and vision, she declared that they would figure out how to welcome these new students, even though they had no idea of where they’d get everything they needed in one month, from residential mattresses to faculty to counselors to computers.

Faced with so much uncertainty, the staff erupted with very strong emotions. Stephanie was aware of the atmosphere of angst-filled emotions. She felt she needed to learn more about their underlying stories, what lay beneath these strong emotions. To do so, she sent one colleague to listen in on the conversations going on at lunch and the faculty room. She wanted to know what people were saying in detail and what role they were in (but no names). When the assigned eavesdropper returned with pages of quotes, Stephanie read through them very slowly, gaining perspective at the 30,000-foot level.

Two very clear stories emerged, which she labeled The Gift and The Firestorm. The Gift story was one of welcome, of grateful parents, of people feeling proud to have figured out how to welcome in the unexpected students. The Firestorm was filled with blame toward Stephanie for having made a decision to accept the extra students, recounting a litany of her past bad behaviors, even threatening to unionize.

At her opening talk in September, she displayed symbols of the two stories, a wrapped gift box and a fire. Each image was arrayed with the direct quotes of staff and faculty. “Usually we don’t know the competing stories and we just keep doing what we’ve been doing, locked into the familiar narrative. Now you see two. It’s time for you to choose.”

Since this event many years ago, Stephanie has taught many leaders to focus on discerning the stories their organizations are living, usually unconsciously. The power for change comes from identifying the narrative and, as a collective, consciously choosing the one they want to live into. It’s not strategic plans, she says, that create change. We need to see clearly the narrative we are blindly following and consciously choose the storyline of who we want to become.³⁰

If Stephanie had not named the stories, or if a strong sense of identity had not been present, the negativity would have continued and the staff would have divided into two factions. Instead, they willingly supported the story that exemplified their identity and aspirations. New students were welcomed in and it all worked out well. Thereafter, staff used the two symbols as shorthand to notice their behaviors. As they were making decisions or determining actions, they would ask each other: Are we acting from Firestorm or Gift? They knew which story they wanted to make true.

Leadership Lessons from Besieged Nuns

The strongest women leaders on the planet today are nuns. I’ve worked with a wide diversity of leaders on all continents for over forty years, and nowhere have I found better leadership than among women religious.

They know whom they serve and are consistently creative in finding ways to meet the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized. After years of working with them in a befriending, consultative role, I coined the slogan “If you want it done, ask a nun.”

And then, in 2009, instead of serving those living at the margins, they became the marginalized when the Vatican determined that American women religious needed to be investigated because they had become too secularized, too feminist, too radical. (This was the first of two Vatican impositions. You’ve already read how the formal leaders of all nuns handled demands for obedience; see p. 92. What I describe here was an earlier investigation conducted on all U.S. nuns and sisters, and what I learned from one congregation’s powerful way to deal with this investigation.)

In late 2009, the Vatican mandated an Apostolic Visitation to “look into the quality of the life” of apostolic institutes of women religious in the United States. Over a period of two years, nearly 100 of the 400 institutes (how the sisters organize) were paid actual visits by Vatican designated observers. (All 400 had to complete documentation.) Whatever the stated purpose was, it appeared that this was part of the Vatican’s efforts to control the behavior of American sisters. The Vatican’s public statements were very harsh, disrespectful, critical, filled with misunderstandings and factual errors. Many sisters, especially the older ones at the end of more than fifty years of consecrated service, felt deep grief and anger. Yet even with these strong emotions present, they relied on their history, charisms, and communities to find their way through, very unusual behavior in any beleaguered or threatened group.

Women religious are well trained in how to discern, to think, and to achieve true consensus. They have long years of experience with reflection, contemplation, and prayer. When they make a decision, everyone has participated in the process, and they are united in how to move forward. The visitation process challenged them deeply; in the midst of fear and doubt, consensus seemed a distant goal. Yet each religious order had to decide on how their institutes or chapters would deal with the visitors.

The story I’m relaying here came from my work with the Sisters of St. Joseph (the U.S. Federation organized into sixteen congregations). Let me pause here to tell you the firm foundation they stand on, a history that always moves me to tears.

Founded in 1650 in France, the Sisters of St. Joseph began as a noncloistered order for ordinary women to be able to work in their communities with “the dear neighbor.” With the political turmoil of the impending French Revolution, they disbanded and went into hiding.

Four of their leaders were condemned to the guillotine, and three were beheaded in one afternoon. But then it grew too dark to continue. The remaining sister, Jeanne Fontbonne, was returned to her cell to await execution the next day. But that night, the French Revolution began with the overthrow of Robespierre, and the executioners were deposed. Jeanne went on to refound the order, which was soon filled with sisters.

In 1836, six sisters ventured to St. Louis to teach deaf children. They had been asked to come to the wild New World by a French bishop who had been advised by a friend to “get the Sisters of St. Joseph because they will do anything.”³¹

This was their history, which they all knew in detail, as they prepared for the Vatican investigations in 2010. At their federation meetings, they debated many approaches, and none were acceptable to all. These were well-tempered conversations, but the distress was also palpable: Why were they investigating us? How should we respond?

And then it all came together. I don’t recall whether it was one of their leaders or an outside advisor, but someone read aloud the Vatican’s statements on domestic abuse. In the silence of that room, the sisters contemplated whether they were the victims of such abuse from priests in power in the Vatican, abuse as defined by the Vatican. Through more conversations and contemplation, they reached a shared understanding that this was an accurate albeit difficult description: they were experiencing domestic abuse.

What happened next shows the incredible power of a shared story. Once they agreed on a shared definition of the problem, they could trust one another as to how best to handle it in their separate congregations.

Collectively, they named the pattern of behaviors they were encountering. As individual congregations, they could be trusted to respond appropriately.

In each of these stories, the role of shared perception is clearly evident. If we are grounded in a common story, one that we choose together, and if we trust one another, then we each are free to use this shared story to make individual decisions. Whatever the particular story might be, it will have resonance only if it is grounded in a shared identity that includes our history and aspirations for who we want to be. Within that identity, a story serves to create a sharper focus to our perceptions; collectively, we interpret the present situation in the same way.

This is a critical leadership responsibility as the organization moves through crises and even in calm times (if these even exist now). It is the leader’s role to make visible the stories, usually unconscious, that people are acting from. And then to consciously name a more empowering story linked to the identity. There are many images for the role that a shared story plays in self-organizing: it is a shared perceptual filter; it creates coherence at the core; it is the reference point for individual actions; it is an aspiration of who we choose to be.

The results are most often astonishing. People feel empowered to make their own decisions, held by colleagues in an atmosphere of trust and encouragement. This atmosphere gives rise to individual and collective confidence. The heavy, dark energy of the challenges lightens as people engage willingly in what needs to get done. And once through a difficult time, people emerge with a stronger sense of belonging, with both the confidence and competence that they can handle whatever is next.

Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.

PERCEPTION: NOTES

¹ The Systems View of Life, p. 252. Well worth reading is the original book, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987). When I first read this book, my world view shifted suddenly and quite wonderfully.

² Ibid., p. 256.

³ Read more about this and its implications for leadership in Leadership and the New Science (3rd ed.), Chap. 4.

⁴ Gribbin, The Quantum Mystery, Kindle locations 394–395.

⁵ J. J. Thomson received the Nobel Prize in 1906 for proving that electrons are particles. He lived to see his son, George Thomson, receive the Nobel Prize in 1937 for proving that electrons are waves. Both of them were right; both awards were justified. In Gribbin, Kindle location 350.

⁶ Gribbin, Kindle locations 554–555.

⁷ If you’re intrigued by the central mystery and its development over time, John Gribbin’s short book is very useful. He ends the book with this statement.

⁸ Deepak Chopra does the math for how much of the Universe is observable through Western science: 70 percent is Dark Energy and 26 percent is Dark Matter, neither of which we understand or can observe. Of the remaining 4 percent that we do observe, nearly all of that is invisible. He concludes that our present science can only speak to 0.01 percent of what’s going on.

I recommend watching this Deepak Chopra presentation at the Science and NonDuality Conference, late 2016, for an excellent explanation of how the Universe is consciousness or awareness. His thesis is in complete concordance with great spiritual traditions. “The Final Destination: The Human Universe,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgPVhe56hT8. This is drawn from his new book, You Are the Universe.

⁹ Here’s an article on dreams with a subtitle that diminishes sacred experiences to neuroscience’s explanation of how revelations happen in the brain: https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-dreams-such-potent-vehicles-for-the-supernatural?

¹⁰ In the Mind and Life dialogues with neuroscientists, the Dalai Lama insists on the distinction between the brain and Mind. These dialogues can be seen on his website.

¹¹ How Does Raven Know? Entering Sacred World: A Meditative Memoir. Note: this book is only available for purchase on my website: http://margaretwheatley.com/books-products/books/raven-know/.

¹² http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/universe-2-trillion-galaxies/.

¹³ Watch Carlin’s brilliant video on human arrogance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjRGee5ipM.

¹⁴ Gribbin details four attempts to explain nonlocality. Words fail me as I read these.

¹⁵ Photos and more descriptions are in my book How Does Raven Know?

¹⁶ Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, ed. Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 18.

¹⁷ Listen to one of these flutes in Werner Herzog’s dramatic and arresting movie about the Chauvet caves: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It’s a very eerie experience.

¹⁸ Thomas Kuhn’s book was published in 1962. It introduced us to paradigm change and was itself a paradigm changer for science, social science, and philosophy. Kuhn has been very important to my own work.

¹⁹ Joel Barker’s term. I still greatly value his work of bringing an awareness of paradigms into business; “The Business of Paradigms” was a video I used many times. And I’ve used his quote, “What is difficult to solve with one paradigm becomes easy to solve with another,” as a guiding principle for my work of attempting to shift the paradigm of leadership.

²⁰ As in Denmark where, in World War II, many people wore yellow stars to protect Jews from the Nazis. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/world/europe/denmark-migrants-refugees-racism.html.

²¹ “Chilcot: Why We Cover Our Ears to the Facts,” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36744911.

²² See an assessment of the Chilcot Report’s major conclusions here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/iraq-inquiry-key-points-from-the-chilcot-report.

²³ All quotes from “Chilcot: Why We Cover Our Ears to the Facts,” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36744911.

²⁴ See this handbook for dealing with hate directed at you: Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

²⁵ This father has spent years fighting back against the “hoaxers,” trying a variety of strategies that have somewhat succeeded. The article is worth reading for the details of the activities of conspiracy theorists and what pushbacks and legal maneuvers seem to stop them or make them scared enough to desist (which then becomes part of their conspiracy theory): http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/the-sandy-hook-hoax.html/.

²⁶ Holocaust denial, the denial of the systematic genocidal killing of millions of ethnic minorities in Europe by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, is illegal in fourteen European nations. Many countries also have broader laws that criminalize genocide denial. Of the countries that ban Holocaust denial, some, such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Romania, were among the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and many of these also ban other elements associated with Nazism, such as the expression of Nazi symbols. Such laws do not exist in the U.S. or the U.K. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial.

²⁷ Asked about whether the rubber ducks had been poisoned, the sender of them said, “I think you could say they were ‘weaponized,’ when we rubbed them on our ball sacks.” http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/the-sandy-hook-hoax.html/

²⁸ I include a few in Recommended Readings, but there are many more good ones. See BerrettKoehler’s catalogue. Yes, they’re my publisher, but it’s because of the quality of their books that I’m proud to be one of their authors.

²⁹ See her wonderful book, The Power to Transform: Leadership That Brings Learning and Schooling to Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007). To learn more about her rich and varied career as a visionary educator, see http://www.stephaniepacemarshall.com/.

³⁰ Years ago when scenarios were popular, one of the founders of this process at Shell Oil Company, Napier Collins, told me that the only really useful scenarios were normative, those that focused people on what they wanted to create rather than simply reacting to the current environment. Seems useful to recall this power of intention and aspiration as we create islands of sanity.

³¹ For more details, see http://www.sistersofsaintjosephfederation.org/about-us/history?id=372.