• Presence in Complexity through a Baby’s Cry

    Presence in Complexity through a Baby’s Cry

    I had the pleasure, honor and intensity of being with my daughter and son-in-law last week with their newborn baby. It was a time of extreme emotions for me – deep joy and relief that this miraculous little being made the transition into this world safely. Feeling the baby’s wide-open heart and sensing her preciousness and innocence. Frustrated by my own habits of pushing myself and working hard in the midst of meeting the baby’s objective needs while attending to my daughter’s condition of physical pain from the delivery, overwhelm, and post-partum hormones. Talk about adapting to a new set of conditions!

    I also noticed how these new set of conditions looked a lot like what I have learned about the domain of Complexity through Doug Silsbee’s new book, Presence-Based Leadership. There was plenty of evidence for this, as we all were living together in a small townhouse with a newborn. The situation become a rapidly changing landscape of what was once a fairly predictable and reliably consistent reality. This sense of unpredictability and ambiguity, including not being able to track cause and effect logically, is a hallmark of the domain of Complexity. [1] [2]

    As first-time parents, these young adults have a lot going for them. Both of them are home for the next 8 weeks and my son-in-law is a full partner in parenting. He is eager and willing to share in all baby care. And they’ve prepared amazingly well. They have bought or received all the latest baby care gadgets and equipment, relying on the advice of their friends who are recent parents. They have researched a wealth of information from the internet on infant care and read several latest best practices books. They have available and generous support from their local care providers. And yet…

    Diving into the Great Unknown — Context, Identity, and Soma

    This new context presented challenges that were beyond anything that preparation alone could provide. I could see influences from the three distinctions from Presence-Based Leadership’s Nine Panes Model of Context, Identity and Soma at play on many levels during my week-long visit. These distinctions are a useful way to tease apart any Complex situation into a simpler view of three levels of nested systems. These systems are always interacting and influencing each other yet can be seen as distinct systems. Context is the level of system that is most familiar; the view of the external situation. Identity is who we take ourselves to be and is the interface between these other two (external and internal) systems. Soma is our internal psychobiology and felt-sense that is organized around our very survival, including protecting and defending our Identity.

    For example, baby Sophia’s behavior is visibly driven by her instincts and the need to survive (Soma). It’s surprising to me to see she is constantly focused on rooting around with her mouth for milk, doesn’t like to be in a wet diaper, or just wants to be cuddled. She had no problem letting those around her know she has a need by crying, and the challenge was trying to figure out exactly what she was asking for!

    I could feel the escalating pressures mounting during my stay of many unknown and unpredictable elements of this new context. Around Soma and Identity, I watched the potential entanglements of my daughter’s physical and emotional states (and need for rest) intersecting with my own identity of “I’m an experienced mother here, I know how to do this.” These mixed in with my own past memories of feeling helpless, unprepared emotionally, and deeply frightened about my ability to actually do what was necessary to take care of a new baby, back in the day. And noticing my dawning awareness that my old knowledge was inadequate in this current time period (Context), as infant practices have shifted quite dramatically from when my own daughter was a new born. For example, now babies sleep on their back; in my day, they slept on their stomach! I think I know what to do now…and suddenly that goes against current practice, of which my daughter gently reminds me, which forces me to be open to receiving new information for each arising situation and flexible enough to change my tried and true strategies.

    Taking a Look in the Mirror around Identity

    Not to mention my own new Identity and status as a first-time grandmother – what do I want to be called? How often can I realistically travel back to another state, two plane rides away, to see this baby again given my already busy travel and teaching schedule (not soon enough!)? How can I be a true support to my daughter who feels deeply stressed and to her husband who will be her main support in this new adventure of parenting?

    And my daughter’s own Identity shifts were in the field as well. Like who is she now as a new mom? What happened to the life she used to know and resonate with? How will this baby care taking thing look when it’s time to go back to work? And her growing awareness that her familiar strategies of making lists, taking time out to read a favorite book, or watching a sitcom on Netflix was no longer available in the realm of 24/7 demands of a newborn. How could she cope without those well-worn stress relievers?

    The Importance of Being Present

    What did I learn about living in these domains of Soma and Identity, while gaining new perspectives in the face of these complex conditions and new Context?

    This is where my practice and embodiment of being present was extremely helpful and available, when I remembered them! As I said, some of my old patterns of over-working showed up, and my concurrent tendency to ignore my own physical signals to take a break every once in a while.  When I became aware of the tightness in my body (Soma), and my habit of pushing myself to do just one more thing (Identity)– run to the store for another dinner item, put laundry in the washer, rub my daughter’s feet to calm her, I was able to take a pause, breathe, and ask what did I actually need right then or soon?

    The good news is that, in those moments, I was able to be present with all that was occurring in the environment of three other people and also myself. Every day I actually took time to put on my walking shoes and walk outside for 30 minutes or sit outside in the sun and mediate in nature. Being present to my own needs was crucial self-care and impacted my own ability to be present with those I love, in this challenging environment.

    Useful Complexity Practices

    Remembering and applying some of the complexity adapted practices from Presence-Based Leadership also offered me some welcome perspectives while I was in the fray of this very busy and demanding time with this new family. The principles of Connection, Fluidity and Stability shed additional light onto this rapidly changing terrain. These principles offer useful perspectives, mindsets and behaviors which support our ability to navigate complexity skillfully.

    For example, as I was able to stay Fluid with managing my own self-expectations with the objective needs of others, I was able to make choices that served the whole. And I could provide the needed Stability of taking over baby care when the parents experienced a difficult night and needed to sleep a few hours. Or I could be available when my daughter needed a compassionate ear to listen to all that was going on for her. These moments of deepened my sense of real Connection with my daughter. I also noticed the sense of Connection that I felt around all of us being in this situation together as a team, doing the best we could. We were all Fluid around adjusting, moment by moment, to this new life entering into the family system.

    Of course, this type of Complexity experience that emerges from changing external conditions applies to all kinds of other situations, not just a newborn in the house! For example, upon entering into our Presence-Based Coaching training program, students can feel stressed and uncertain as they begin to see the limitations of their old strategies and identities. Students are trying to adapt to new structures of the coaching conversation, learning to be present and embody presence while managing new coaching tools and moves that can seem foreign at first.

    These new complex conditions also apply to leadership as well, where a leader might find herself overwhelmed by taking on more responsibly or managing a new global team that is squabbling or in dealing with radically shifting market conditions or budget cuts or hiring freezes.

    Questions to Generate Awareness and Perspectives

    I’ll leave it to you, from my descriptions above, to make your own extrapolations to what variations of complexity might be happening in your world these days. Here are some questions to get you thinking and perhaps generate some new awareness or perspectives…

    • How do you recognize you are in the domain of complexity?
    • How are the levels of systems of Context, Identity, and Soma influencing your current challenge?
    • How do you wake up when your habits put you on automatic pilot, like working or pushing harder (or collapsing) as a strategy?
    • What’s one way you might experiment with the principles of Connection, Stability or Fluidity in your particular situation?

    [1] For more on Complexity as a domain, see this post and Presence-Based Leadership by Doug Silsbee [2] For more information on Complexity in general check out David Snowden and Cultivating Leadership

    Bebe Hansen

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  • Transitions

    Transitions
    What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly Richard Bach
    Transitions…we all know them and have experienced them. I am in one. It feels really useful and liberating to remember that many things have just recently radically changed for me as a result of losing my longtime friend, collaborator, teaching and business partner, Doug Silsbee.  I am navigating new territory.

    Lately I’m noticing in my experience a feeling of being “on my own.”

    Lately I’m noticing in my experience a feeling of being “on my own.” This feels different from other internal spaces I’ve inhabited in my life that are close but not exactly like this “on my own” place.  I am clear I don’t feel “abandoned” (familiar in years past), or “it’s all up to me” (familiar also from my years of being an entrepreneur and pusher of the river). I don’t feel longing, or lonely, or stark aloneness (sometimes called existential aloneness).  As I step back and take a quick glance at my life, I actually feel very supported and surrounded these days, professionally, personally, and spiritually.  And yet, here’s this “on my own” felt-sense that’s present. Frankly, I think it has to do at least partially with Doug’s body no longer living on this planet.  And I continue to grieve his loss.  Of course, Doug continues to live in me, in my history and through those years that our collaboration and the work itself shaped us both.  Those experiences support me in practical ways every day, both professionally and personally, and I am grateful!

    And I continue to grieve his loss

    From the Minutia to the Present And when I’m in the middle of the daily grind of office days, sometimes I am able to wake up from my habitual focus on the minutia that make up my usual work routines.  I find myself getting lost in checking emails, tracking progress of projects, delegating (and not being the bottle neck to other’s work!), and coordinating action between lots of moving parts of PBC training and my life as a whole.  Reminders, such as my 2018 vision board sitting across from my desk, abound in my environment.  They are calling me to be present, take a pause…and when I release my tight focus for a breath or moment, I can actually see them!  Being present allows me to acknowledge my transition in leadership, and PBC’s transition as a business.  As I start to relax a bit, I am able to witness a bigger view of the movement that’s always happening around, in and through me. Insight: A Strong Wind Arrives We had a cold front blow in over the weekend, and as I stood outside on a gorgeous, sunny day with the temperature in the 60’s, I marveled at how strong the wind was in my own back yard.  Blowing the trees around, making a loud racket like a freight train.  I felt excitement and delight at the wind’s heralding of the season changing into fall. I was imaging moving into warmer clothes, having a fire in the fire place, sipping some fresh, warmed apple cider.  Once I came back inside the house, I realized that my relationship to this particular season change was very different to my relationship to the change I’m experiencing now around this transition at work.  Especially around the “on my own” space.

    I felt excitement and delight at the wind’s heralding of the season changing into fall

    Standing outside, I felt connected to the weather, to the earth, to the natural rhythms of the change of season.  In contrast, the “on my own” space feels, well, on my own.  I became curious: are the remnants of my historical experience, overlaid with old narratives of “I’ve been left” or “it’s all up to me,” driving a sense of urgency, of overwhelm?  And the predictable and familiar reactive habits of focusing in the weeds of the daily grind?  As I sense into it, this “on my own” feeling is quite neutral, in and of itself.  Perhaps it is actually pointing to a growing sense of autonomy in me, as I move more fully into the #1 leader role at PBC?  And with that independence comes a sense of more freedom to make my own choices.  I am full of gratitude to have plenty of wise council, additional perspectives and support from many others who care about Doug, me and this work. And some of the hard decisions are mine alone to make. Questions I Am Asking Myself Here are some questions I am asking myself:
    • How is my experience of the change of season different from this feeling of “on my own”? (Context)
    • What makes it exciting vs overwhelming?( Soma)
    • What assumptions am I holding about the season change, and about shifts in my work life? (Context, Identity)
    • Who am I taking myself to be in this moment, and how is that shifting ?(Identity)
    As you see, I can’t help myself in making distinctions around the Nine Panes, from Doug’s latest book, Presence-Based Leadership.The Nine Panes is the core model from the book that offers nine powerful distinctions, perspectives and practices around leading in complexity.  As I tease apart these differences in the levels of systems of which I am a part (Context, Identity, Soma), these levels of scale continue to percolate into my consciousness. And I am noticing how they affect my experience, my perspectives.

    There’s always more to explore as the seasons continue to change, and I continue to change with them

    As I said, it feels useful to acknowledge that I am still in transition and will be for some time. And perhaps that feeling of “on my own” will be present for a long while, too.  There’s always more to explore as the seasons continue to change, and I continue to change with them. I can’t control the weather change. I can pay attention to my moment-to-moment experience.  And as I do that, I notice an opportunity for choice: I can stay within the confines of my historical views and habits.  Or I can practice resting into a more spacious perspective, like the change of season, and know I am a part of the bigger dynamism of life that is always happening within and around me. A Question For You If you (or a loved one or colleague) are experiencing any kind of transition, what questions would be useful for you (or them) to contemplate? Feel free to offer your questions below…

    Bebe Hansen

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  • Presence in Complexity Series #1: Reading Our Context

    Presence in Complexity Series #1: Reading Our Context
    Because we don’t know how to navigate this terrain, we tend to double down on what we’ve always done in an effort to re-establish our inner sense of a competent self.

    Because we don’t know how to navigate this terrain, we tend to double down on what we’ve always done in an effort to re-establish our inner sense of a competent self.

    It’s most people’s experience that the world we live in is changing rapidly. We experience it as “VUCA,” a term coined by the acronym-favoring military at the end of the 80’s to describe the emerging post-Cold War world. The acronym stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, the intensity of which has increased dramatically since the term was invented.

    Great. So we have a name for a world we experience as overwhelming! So what?

    This is not the world that our education was generally designed to prepare us for, nor the world that traditional narratives about success teach us that we should be able to largely control and direct according to our wishes. It’s the world we actually live in. And we need new ways to make sense of it.

    In my schools there was a right answer. I thought if I was smart enough I would figure it out. When I got the right answer I felt good, and was rewarded with external validation in the form of praise and grades. When I didn’t… well, not so much.

    The conventional narrative is work hard, be honest, build our skills, treat people well, and things will more or less go according to our wishes. Now though, we notice increasingly that doing the right things doesn’t necessarily produce the results we expected.

    In fact, there’s a greater and greater dissonance between the world we have prepared to inhabit and the world that actually exists. A growing gap between our reasonable expectations that we can control much of our worlds, and the disturbing evidence that we can’t control much at all. This dissonance is part of what is fueling angry anti-establishment political movements.

    Further, we can feel that it’s our fault. We sometimes think we only need to tighten down. Work harder. Build our leadership or technical competencies. Get more power so we are finally in charge. Then, somehow, the ship would right itself and we’d be able to sail more or less on course to what James Flaherty calls “the island where everything works out.”

    This is actually wrong. Our internalized and instinctive responses to changing conditions are often wrong. Doubling down to do more what we’ve always done is usually anti-helpful.

    The most useful starting point towards a radically new way of leading is actually a new way of seeing the world. It means being present to what is real, instead of being surprised and reactive when it differs from what we expect.

    In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Dave Snowden proposes four domains. These broad distinctions begin to build a vocabulary for observing and navigating a new reality that is radically different from what we have prepared for. And, they support new ways to organize ourselves as leaders.

    These domains are:

    • Obvious (Snowden uses the term Simple.) This is the domain of predictable, straightforward action. Cause and effect is known, and we can safely assume that if we take a certain action, our desired results will follow. Changing the tire on the car, delegating a project to a competent direct report, sitting down to a family dinner.
    • Complicated. Here, cause and effect is predictable, but we don’t necessarily know how to do it. With the right expertise (which we can presumably find) we can create an optimal solution, but there are lots of interrelated elements in a solution that have to be considered for the best results. Diagnosing a subtle engine problem, prioritizing tasks in a complicated workflow, planning an elaborate menu for a dinner party with multiple dietary restrictions.
    • Complex. In this domain, cause and effect are not predictable. There are many interrelated factors that are unknown, and some things in the system affect other things in ways that are not possible to predict. The harder we push, the more unanticipated side effects tend to appear. Others behave in ways that don’t make sense to us. Driving through rush hour when the optimal route is constantly changing, building commitment in a team to a new and challenging project, a family reunion where some of the people dislike each other.
    • Chaotic. Here, events are disconnected, and seem to appear at random. There is no apparent cause and effect at all, and phenomena are coming at us faster than we can react or make sense. There’s no time to process, and patterns are not visible to us. A truck runs a red light in front of us and we careen to avoid it, an all hands emergency meeting is called in the middle of our team planning session, a fistfight breaks out at the family reunion.

    If we misread the context, and act from wrong assumptions, we will find ourselves expending lots of energy and getting poor results.

    For example, if we log onto Waze to obtain crowd-sourced traffic flow to drive to the store on a Sunday morning with no traffic (responding to an Obvious context with a Complex solution,) our kids will think we are trying to be cool but are actually being ridiculous. This is low cost but illustrative.

    However, if we need to build team commitment to a challenging project (Complex) but treat it as if it were simply a matter of re-prioritizing tasks (Complicated) we will be rightly seen as tone-deaf, controlling and simplistic. Much bigger cost.

    In complexity, we find our sense of our own competence challenged. Because we don’t know how to navigate this terrain, we tend to double down on what we’ve always done in an effort to re-establish our inner sense of a competent self. (The effects of this on our own identity are the topic of the next post!)

    Building our literacy at staying present, sensing the context, and then acting consistently with what the context is asking of us, is the art of leadership.

    • What challenge are you facing that is confronting you with the limitations of what you can control?
    • What components of this challenge are Obvious, Complicated, and Complex, or Chaotic?
    • How do these distinctions help you make sense of the situation?

    This is the first of a series of blog posts on the topic of presence and complexity. Please comment below, and share with others.

    And, for more great resources on this subject, see the blog of my dear friends and colleagues, Carolyn Coughlin and Jennifer Garvey Berger and Jennifer’s book, Simple Habits, co-authored with Keith Johnston.

    Doug Silsbee

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