Now that we all are plunged into levels of uncertainty that seem unprecedented, the bedrock assumptions of western culture and leadership are being challenged. I want to share some reflections on visionary leadership through a personal lens.

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I am old enough to remember the cold war and hiding under a desk in case of a nuclear war (does this make any sense?) The fear in my generation was real, and our disillusionment during the Vietnam war was pervasive. I remember being amazed at the number of CEOs who claimed they had no idea their companies were polluting as Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring provoked a period of considerable media attention on leadership and their responsibilities. But today feels more serious.

In addition to rising uncertainty, we also face some very disturbing certainties. The world is steadily warming. Co2 is at its highest level in the last 400,000 years. We are not making progress in stopping this and the impacts are locked in for my and my children’s generation. And this isn’t the only disturbing certainty. As troublesome and less understood is the role that social media and AI is playing in fragmenting our awareness on the one hand, opening the world to everyone on the other, and fundamentally challenging assumptions about democratic process and collaboration. It feels like the attention economy is just another extractive mining operation not unlike the carbon economy, with profit considered legitimate so long as one ignores the impacts on children, local cultures (and now the globe itself)? This technology is on a runaway course just like global warming.

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What are we to do? And what have I, as a leader of several organizations, been doing all this time?

I’ve consulted to high tech, jetted around the world leading visual planning sessions, believed that collaboration and design thinking can make a difference, been a part of creating a new field of visual facilitation. But it doesn’t feel like enough. I realize I have not made deep enough friends with real uncertainty. Managing symbols on the wall is not enough. My ideas about visionary leadership are shifting well beyond appealing vision maps, as useful as they are.

Last year I attended a summer solstice gathering with colleagues in the change business. We were gathering at Sequoia Retreat Center near Ben Lomond, CA, amidst redwood forests that had been scorched by wildfire. It nearly destroying the retreat center but for the vigilance of many locals who risked lives to shield it. Many trees were blackened. In spite of that, much new growth was already coming through the ashes. Out of one of those groves I found a burnt shoot and married it with a hawk feather that had been on the path to breakfast. The feather is symbolic of the East and new visions. The burnt root of the fires of change we are  experiencing. 

Here is an image of the wand, sitting on my studio singing bowl. 

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The commitment I made this last year was to focus on supporting the new growth I see emerging in these times, to support new people learning to do change work, and to reach out and support people who have the courage to lead into our new challenges. I also committed to “see” this new growth—not in the future—but right now. What does it mean to be a “seer” of the new? What does it mean to experience potential when there are no clear rational ways to realize it? What does it mean to let the light into the present, and to stand in the ashes and look at the emergent new?

I don’t have a list of ready answers, even while taking a stab at some in a recent Grove article on Visionary leadership that appeared in our journal. What I have is a new hope, and a belief that there are others who dare to have these kinds of visions—visions filled with light and potential but not the clarity of plans—and held by people who know that inviting others into the co-inventing required to move forward is possible, and exciting, and the true hope. I want to find and support these people.

This is my vision for our Global Learning & Exchange Network (the GLEN). This is my vision for a new Grove that focuses on supporting visionary leadership. This is my vision for letting our do-it-yourself tools for visioning and change be available to the world through Grove Tools so people can connect with their own seeing. This eco-system of a consulting firm, a non-profit educational wing, and a tools business is something I’m experiencing growing under my feet, with the involvement of many others, and can now be a platform for this new commitment.

 My vision is to serve the light that comes into the darkness when we still ourselves and open to guidance and the new growth that is always emerging. I’m moving toward another Summer Solstice this June, a July vision quest on Mt. Shasta, and a silent retreat in Germany in September. My intention is to look more deeply into this calling and ask what it intends for me to do now.

Stay tuned. I plan to share about what comes through on a regular basis.

My writing keeps leaning into the poetic. Here is one reflecting on “whiteness” following many conversations with clients and colleagues about being culturally sensitive.

WHITENESS

I stare at the point
on the horizon where
the sun will rise.

I stare without moving
until the entire landscape
becomes white,
a trance of
not seeing.

A bird lands on a tree
near my focal point
and the movement jumps
out like fireworks,
then back to white.

I grew up in a town
where all the faces were white,
different shades of course
but not seen as color.

One year a man from Nigeria
visited, his black face jumped out
of the whiteness of my youth
in a burst of awareness.

Did this surprise later
draw me to a city
without a dominant color,
a port town, pulling from
the world, patches of white
with large splashes of color.

I wonder if whiteness is
simply the absence of color
or is it the field beyond form,
the clear white light
arising in stillness and death?

Is reaching for being white
a call to this light, an escape
from identity and control?
The sky began to glow
as I stared.

The sun itself burst through
at the very center
of my focus.

And from that point two Peregrines
rose from the tree and
spiraled into the sun.

They danced and dived, and
my vision was no longer
a field of white, but a
riot of feeling
as I flew into the day.

On the white page of my
journal, a single stroke
breaks the whiteness.

Sometimes, like a bird,
it flies unimpeded by
color or form, white
and black dancing on
the same page.

When did we lose
our connection,
to the beauty
of surprise?

For a couple of months I have been in a writing dyads with a colleague. We give each other prompts. Write for 20 minutes. Read what emerges, and then share how the writing landed. What resonated? What touched us.

As a result I’ve been writing poems, and somehow the voice that is coming out is one I want to reinforce, so I am sharing a poem I wrote and evolved a bit this morning. It’s current. It is called:

PREMONITION

Long cycles hide in the

busy flow of daily life,

deep currents under the

crashing waves.

 

Sometimes the cycles are a slow crumbling,

a weakening of foundations

that give way abruptly

breaking the surface calm,

giant whales of change.

 

Living in earthquake country

I listen for faint signals with

my body, tiny tremors that

foreshadow a major snap.

 

Is this background vigilance

sharpened my foreseeing,

or is the nervousness I feel

the past pushing forward,

clouding, memories of Vietnam?

 

Entrenched institutional arrangements

move like tectonic plates.

And their locked shifting can snap

and become depressions, and wars.

 

But are these tremors I feel today

true markers to be followed, and

feared, or simply the crumbling

confidence of my own long life?

 

Sometimes excitement seeking young people

play chicken with their fast machines,

but the institutional cracking and straining

I feel now, though called a game of chicken,

foreshadows more than a crash,

more a crumbling of trust,

with dreams and lives being pulled

into an opening chasm.

 

I breath in the fall air

and notice the lack of rain.

A central little tree in our back yard,

tucked under larger oaks

has died.

I look around for other

signs that this drought is

cutting more deeply,

quickening our cooking.

 

When will the long cycles

finally snap through

the sea of our distractions

and bring us face to face with

the breeching whales of change,

the generation shaping crumbling

of our foundations?

 

And what is asked of us with

this foreseeing?

 

In his book American Soul, philosopher Jacob Needleman wrote, “The art form of the future is the group. The intelligence and benevolence we need can only come from the group, from associations of men and women seeking to struggle against the impulses of illusion, egoism and fear.” This quote animated Alan Briskin’s exploration of the headwaters of this idea at the first Leading as Sacred Practice (LASP) gathering in 2016 at Holger Scholz’s Beuerhof Retreat Farm in the Vulkan Eifle region of Germany. To support the dialogue that resulted, we co-created this graphic of thought leaders we knew resonated with this idea.

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The four of us guiding Leading as Sacred Practice (Gisela Wendling, Alan, Holger and I) had begun calling ourselves a facilitation “Ensemble.” We shared a deep interest in collaboration and supporting a mindset that values the whole human being— spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical— AND avoiding religiosity, ideology, and blind faith.

This first retreat sparked a shift in our work, and ignited a path of co-discovery. We have been meeting and working as an ensemble ever since through two more gatherings in 2017 at IONs Earthrise Retreat Center in Petaluma, and then in 2018 back at the Beuerhof.

We decided to take a gap year in 2019, and then for 2020 planned a larger conference. But COVID appeared and we delayed again. The pandemic pushed us to create a virtual version to continue the work, and the publishing of some of our findings so far in our LASP eBook. (We are giving this away for free in the description of our series of six LASP Online Exchanges starting April 23). Our learning focuses on six “ways” we have found to lead as sacred practice.

What is an Ensemble?

I was describing our ensemble experience to a close friend, Joe Ruffato, a musician and member of a Medicine Community that I am also a member of. I could explain the “ensemble idea” easily since the medicine community is very collaborative and Joe understands what this means musically. An ensemble is a group of musicians who play together. What is not embodied in the formal definition is the meaning that is understood by professional musicians. Joe told me a story that made the point.

“When I produced my first CD I worked with three professional musicians who brought piano, base, and drums to my guitar playing and singing of my songs. We worked through several studio sessions and produced a draft version. I then had a chance to talk to our producer about it and asked him what he thought. ‘Do you really want to know,” the man replied. ‘Yes,’ I said. “He then told me that I was over strumming and doing some other things that didn’t completely balance, “ Joe said. “I came away and put the CD on hold. So I practiced and then after some months came back with a completely up-leveled performance.”

Joe went on to describe what he learned from the three musicians he had worked with. They all were very skilled in what they did, and all shared a sensitivity to the “ensemble” level of play. “They never filled the space to the detriment of the other musical voices,” Joe said. “I realized that’s what it means to be a pro.”

And I realized in Joe’s story this is what is means to be a good ensemble—to never fill the space in a way that works to detriment of another player. This means honoring the rotation of the spotlight in jazz. It means not over playing. It means listening to the whole.

Ensemble as An Artform for the Future

Having spent my adult life facilitating group process, I realized that the Ensemble idea we have used to guide our Leading as Sacred Practice work, might also be a form that could be replicated and even celebrated professionally in other group work settings.

More and more it seems that one of the shifts that we need to make as we come out of shelter-at-home and move into other escalating global issues like global warming, is to open to more imaginative “we” forms of working together. No single person is expert enough to respond to the systemic challenges we face. No solo player can lead the transformation changes necessary to work with them. Collaborative networks, action learning teams, and yes “ensembles” are needed to allow pooling of knowledge and learning as we move forward.

Groups can be the art form of the future.

Join us for the Leading as Sacred Practice Online Exchange Series. April 23, 2021, and experience one.