Jan 05, 2025

Jan 05, 2025h in Cognition & Communications, Inspiration, Mental Models, Phillosophy, Relationship, Spirituality by

As the son of a minister, I can’t get through the holidays without thinking about the swirl of myths and stories that surround Christmas. This year I experienced them in a new way and want to share how this is landing for me.

As I write I’m concluding my 204th Journal that began August 4 and is titled, “Walking with Jesus.” I always name a journal to provide a high-level theme for the next months. To understand why I chose this one I need to share a story.

walkingwithjesusBut before I do, I invite you to notice what gets called up for you with just these words. What is your experience with the word “Walking?” What does “With” mean to you? And then there is the loaded word, “Jesus.” I say loaded because few people have had more writing, dramatizations, prayers to, and art about than Jesus. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had very little idea of what I’m personally meaning by any of these words. I invite you to read on with an open mind if possible.

My journey began with Birkenstock sandals that my wife Gisela gave to me because my favorite sandals had worn out. By nature, I have a lot of energy. I like to move and feel like I’m getting somewhere quickly. But these new sandals don’t support being fast. They support a nice, mindful walking. At first, I wasn’t sure I liked them.

My thinking about religion and faith was reactivated reading an award-winning science fiction novel called The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. It involves a Jesuit priest who finds and loses his belief in God in a first ever encounter with aliens on a planet near Alpha Centauri. Russell’s writing is a marvelous exploration of the role of spirituality’s interaction with religious orthodoxy and I found myself thinking of my own experience with Protestantism.

I mentioned this book in our Global Learning & Exchange Group at one Friday morning Café and one of our members suggested, that if I were interested in the role of faith in one’s life, I might watch The Chosen, a four-season mini-series exploring the life of Jesus Christ and his disciples. While the story maps to the scriptures, the portrayals of the disciples and their group dynamics is fictional and very contemporary. And Jesus, as the main character, is played by Jonathan Roumie, a relatively unknown actor until this role, in a depiction that is human and accessible. We ended up watching all four seasons over a period of weeks. (The story of this series is something on its own, crowdsourced at about $1million and attracting over 100 million viewers worldwide.)

One evening after watching I was taking the garbage out, wearing my new sandals, and as I walked slowly in the dark, I felt like I was in Galilea, walking like Roumie was walking, and allowed myself to imagine I was, for an instance, the embodiment of Jesus walking along.

I was very surprised at the feelings I was having. The key understanding here is what I mean by embodiment. I mean having an internal, sensory body feeling that is pervasive. It isn’t like thinking about something.

All during my early years I prayed to Jesus, attended church and Sunday school, and read the scriptures, but I did not experience embodying Jesus. He was a figure that was clearly “not me.” I had many questions about how a person could rise from the dead, be the result of a virgin birth, and be compassionate even when being tortured. But the overall image was of a loving, forgiving person who believed that all people could experience divine energy and guidance, what he called the “Kingdom of Heaven.” I was taught I could pray to him and that he might be able to provide guidance.

My questioning increased in college, however, and I fell away from the church in the process of differentiating from my parents. College emphasized rational thought, science, analytic philosophy, and political awareness. It was the time of assassinations, movements, protests, and the Vietnam war. I and most of my friend were very upset and losing faith in many institutions including the church. I went into journalism following my own questioning and trying to make sense out of the world, but it was primarily and intellectual exercise.

I didn’t come back around to faith and my own spiritual life until my 50s, when I began vision questing and working with a Jungian therapist named Chayim Barton. In addition to being deeply knowledgeable about Jewish mysticism, he was a student of a Tibetan rinpoche, Lama Yeshe, who came to teach at UC Santa Cruz in the 60s. Chayim went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology comparing the work of Carl Jung to the six yogas of Naropa, a central part of the Gelug tradition he studied with Lama Yeshe.

Chayim had been encouraged to share his Tibetan knowledge, staying faithful to the traditions of transmission in passing along the meditations. I wanted to know about this path so Chayim introduced me to a meditation on Avalokiteshvara, the deity of compassion and the antidote to the Buddhist poison of aversion or hatred. This archetype is considered to be resonant with Jesus, Quan Yin, Buddha, and other deities modeling compassion. I worked with this meditation frequently for more than a year.

Without describing the actual meditation, I can say that a central feature is to fully imagine the deity and all its attributes, and then embody its energy and imagine all its attributes activating in one’s own nervous system and feelings. In this case, the focus is on feeling and sending out love to all sentient beings.

Chayim himself was a product of an active meditative life and an embodiment of a loving, healing person. His nonjudgemental, sensitive way was deeply inspiring to me. Unfortunately, he died at age 58 in a bicycle collision with a truck on a foggy Capitola morning, but his teaching and modeling persists.

In 2018 Gisela and I began studying with Thomas Hübl, an Austrian mystic and spiritual teacher initially helping Germans deal with war trauma and now teaching worldwide. He embodies love and compassion in a remarkably impeccable way, creating group fields of acceptance and healing in his process that have opened many to a new relationship with their own souls. He does not describe himself as a Christian but is openly inspired by the example of Jesus.

In 2023, Gisela and I were able to attend a week-long retreat in India with Patrick Conner, another spiritual teacher from the UK who teaches about reconnecting with light and love and unwinding the tribal conditioning that keeps us from true self-acceptance and joy. He too embodies love, compassion, and non-judgement without holding a religious association with Christianity.

If you can imagine me overlaying memories of Chayim, Thomas, and Patrick with my practice of embodying Avelokiteshwara, amplified by positive memories and stories from childhood and the dramatization of what Jesus might be like in the acting of Roumie, you might appreciate how this congruence of images might affect me.

Well, on that night taking out garbage, I decided to adopt “Walking with Jesus” as a meditation practice. It puts aside the historic story, the teachings, the church, and focuses on my inner feeling of compassion and an open heart, of feeling my connection with all other living beings. As of August 5, I stopped drinking completely so that was not in the way of my feelings. I also stopped drinking coffee. And the daily, even hourly meditation has had a real impact. I can now access the feeling of compassion even when I’m triggered and upset. I breath in the images and my body/mind responds.

I share this now because I want to walk differently into the coming months. I don’t want to experience a riptide of blaming and worry. I don’t want to pretend I know the future or borrow scary images of what it might be. I want to live day to day in alive response to all the people I meet, seeing their light, looking for and accepting emerging solutions to problems, and being a source of light myself. Of course, there is a lot of chopping wood and carrying water. And there is my knowing that in another time, another man called Jesus, was able to endure the entire Roman Empire and death itself by staying in touch with his divine source.

 

Dec 20, 2024

Dec 20, 2024h in Cognition & Communications, Inspiration, Leading Change, Mental Models, Phillosophy, Process Theory, Social Change by

I’m not making a big claim in observing that the reigning orientation of our contemporary culture sees prosperity, growth, and power as essential aspects of progress. It is in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism on one side of the Atlantic and Russian expansion on the other. It’s embedded in the bitcoin promise, the colonization of space, and most exaggeratedly in the AI industry. It’s what many mean by “greatness.

The underlying myth is that materialistic growth is positive, even good in an evolutionary way. The problem with this myth is that it is a lie, meaning it doesn’t conform to what we usually define as truth, which is fact-based observation, and isn’t a good representation of the arc of evolution in nature. Scientific research does not support the idea that bigger is better. In fact, maximization of a species or ecosystem invariably results in collapse or degeneration. Why is this contradiction sustained?

One of my early influences was the thinking of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish scholar shocked by the Great War, who explored how the structure of our language shapes perception and conflict in society. He noted that the English language has a subject-object construction which consistently invites “reifying” or objectifying things in order complete our sentences. “We are this.” “You are that.” And when the objectifying involves qualities and characteristics that are not objects but fluid phenomena like attitudes and feelings, we create boxes of meaning that are inflammatory. “You are racist” instead of “Your last statement discredited someone on the basis of their color.” This objectification, applied to describing political leanings, hardens into identities and positions that become inflexible, i.e. blue and red.

cartesiancoordinatesI’ve found that the shaping of our awareness by language extends to visdowjoneschartual language and the mental frameworks we hold to explain things. The objectification of reality is supported, for instance, by our habit of displaying data on Cartesian coordinates, which portray the “0” point as nothing, and progress is up and to the right. If there is an icon for contemporary business it is the ubiquitous stock market graphic plotted on these coordinates.

But what does this have to do with our evolutionary mythology?

When objectivity and materiality is overvalued then more of something is generally considered to be better. The idea of something being better because it has more functionalities becomes replaced by the idea of being better by having more material goods. Clearly one is better off with more money, more house, more power, more freedom —who can argue?

Nature argues. Scientists have discovered over the decades of the 20th Century, that what we consider objective and material, i.e. the molecular world, is based elements that are progressively uncertain and unpredictable. Molecules are made up of less predictable atoms which can absorb and give off electrons unpredictable. These are composed of even more unpredictable fundamental forces (electrons and protons), and ultimately on almost completely unpredictable photons of light at the quantum level, which appear as particles sometimes and waves at other depending on how the experiment is set up. In nature the evolutionary process means less predictable elements come together and create material structures that then become the means for evolving more expressions of capability. It is a journey from freedom to constraint and back to freedom.

In evolutionary process light becomes forces, become atoms, become molecules, with some molecular structures then developing remarkable abilities. DNA allows the plant world to grow, branch, bloom, and seed, absorbing elements from its environment and converting them with photosynthesis and other processes. This abundance can even renew itself following cycles of the sun and moon.

But plants never reach the scale of mountains and oceans. The tallest tree is a Coastal Redwood in California at 379 feet tall. Aspen groves can span 100 acres, but that is still nowhere near the size of the mountain ranges upon which they live. If plants can growth, why not expand and expand? Nature demonstrates that when plants overgrow, they become vulnerable to weather and bugs and cannot continue growing. We call uncontrolled organic growth cancers.

The arc of evolution doesn’t stop with plants. Some molecular structures, primarily protein molecules, have extensions like arms and legs that can form large aggregations allowing animals to run and fly. These extensions are also evident in more advanced communication capability, that allow pods of whales to communicate over 100 and even thousands of miles, and butterflies to migrate thousands of miles to specific ne casting sites. But it is not their material being that expands to this size, but the songs and vibrations. The largest blue whale is only 108 feet long physically, smaller by a good degree than the redwoods. The tallest giraffe is only 18 feet and the tallest elephant 13 feet tall.

And finally come humans with the miraculous development of highly evolved nervous systems capable of symbolic representation, imaging the future, documenting the past. But physically, objectively, the body size of humans is almost the same worldwide. The shortest is a Nepalese man who was 21 inches tall (and lived to age 72). The largest man in recent history was 8’11” tall. But most people are in a range between 5.5 and 6 feet tall.

Arthur M. Young, the evolutionary theorist who integrated scientific findings in his arc of evolution (explained in his book the Reflexive Universe) believed that this consistency in human form compared to less evolved beings was the result of the structural requirement of having both growth and mobility and a bi-lateral symmetry in the nervous system that supported reflexive thinking. However, explaining why humans are basically similar in size is not required to appreciate that human functionality is supported by a physical structure that requires a lot less material matter than animals, plants, and the ground itself.

To illustrate the longer arc of evolution Young turned the Cartesian system upside down and suggested that the “0” point represented no freedom, not no material. The bottom line, in fact, represents all material manifestation with the upper lines representing levels of increasingly less objectivity and more freedom. His summary graphic looks like this.topnewbandswithtorus

If you agree that evolutionary progress can be defined as having more functionality than less evolved phenomenon, the lesson of nature is that the more evolved phenomenon exhibit and may even require a substantial reduction in material physicality. This gives new meaning to the saying that “less is more.” (Paradoxically the high-tech industry, champions of maximization, agree when they take pride in chips getting smaller and doing more with less.)

True evolutionary development is supported by optimization of resources, not maximization. Maximization in fact will probably get in the way of higher functionality.

In a time of big lies and falsehoods providing currency in the attention economy, our biggest lie—that materialism leads to evolutionary progress—may be our real undoing. Its truth of its opposite could be a source of hope.

Apr 07, 2024

Apr 07, 2024h in Cognition & Communications, Graphic Facilitation, Inspiration, Mental Models, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Uncategorized by

 

Sometimes guidance just appears. No warning. It happened to me at the end of a three-day Leadership Transformation Workshop in Minnesota, in the last five minutes on a Friday to be precise. I got up to go to the table in back where I had my journal and almost fell over. My left leg felt like it had gone completely asleep. I was helped back, sat, and realized it wasn’t asleep. It just wasn’t connected any more. I had had a stroke!

Stroke2024Thirty minutes later after a drive to a nearby emergency room I was in a CAT scan and found that I had a half inch long hemorrhagic bleed (stroke) on the surface of my right, central cortex, near my left side motor controls. I could feel the skin on my leg. I could move it with my big muscles, but I was not in control of it. Needless to say, I was on my back at 30 degrees angle the next two days, awakened every hour for a complete check on my cognition, eye movements, hands, leg lifts—all through the night.

I’m happy to say that this was a “small” stroke. I was released Sunday at noon and flew back to San Francisco, with referrals from the neurologists there and complete records. A second CAT Scan and an MRI did not detect anything else. No cancer. No clots. No aneurisms. No progression. And they saw I could make it around with a walker already, which they provided from my trip home.

They didn’t measure my psyche, of course. That is outside the purview of most modern medicine. Although staff at Health East’s University Hospital ICU, where I was sent, by ambulance, after the initial scan in ER, was uniformly comforting and caring, they were not “measuring” the larger impact. The therapist was more focused on the exercises I should do repeatedly. They did keep asking me my name, date of birth, and if I remembered why I was in the hospital.

I’ve lived my life gifted with immense curiosity and this experience has me fascinated. If I were massively crippled, I’d probably feel differently, but I just came in from a slow walk around my neighborhood two weeks later and am feeling pretty good. But my mind is whirling. What does it mean to have a stroke?

  1. I now know that merely saying this word shakes people up. It covers so much and is so common, that everyone has some connection. It is a big deal. Our staff at The Grove and my kids think it is a big deal. So does Gisela, my partner and wife. No flying or driving until I get cleared by the neurologist I meet with tomorrow. Everyone at the University Hospital said that this isn’t a repeating kind of thing, especially with a person with normal blood pressure and no hypertension.
  2. I also know that my body knows how to heal. My brother, John, who has practiced reflexology, muscle testing, and applied kinesiology for as long as I’ve been facilitating, came over and completely checked me out. He was amazed at my progress, aided by a lot by moving around like a Tai Chi practitioner. I figured my right leg knows how to move. Teach the left. Rock back and forth. John agreed and encouraged my movements. I also kept imagining I was in Avatar hooking up to one of the flying dragons. My leg’s nerve endings reaching up. My brain coming down. Both eventually reconnecting.
  3. I have discovered that there are many many tinier muscles that bring stability to a leg, and it isn’t so clear how to reconnect them. Why does my left leg seem to snap back instead of just bending back? I feel like I’m on some kind of plateau in recovery. The leg feels weaker, although I didn’t hurt it in any way. Maybe the neurologist at Kaiser, who I see for the first tomorrow, will have some ideas.
  4. I know that situations like this have cascading effects, and this is no exception. In my case my ability to hear high frequencies has been declining and is now gone. My hearing aids compensate, but not enough to hear the soft, mumbled words of a person with a high-pitched voice. In an echoey room or sketchy zoom connection I miss key words. This isn’t acceptable if your job is to record what people say visually (and accurately). The room in Minnesota was a real struggle in that regard. I’ve been concerned for a while, but it took the stroke for me to say “enough.” Gisela agreed it was truly time for me to stop facilitating meetings and that she and The Grove team could take over the remaining work on our books. Fortunately, since she has become CEO of The Grove the team is growing again and are managing beautifully. Our clients have been wonderfully accepting.
  5. So, I not only had a real physical stroke, small though it may be, I have retired from a kind of work that I’ve done for 52 years, if you count my doing the first Group Graphics workshop at Coro in 1972. That is like having a professional stroke. And I am now experiencing truly liminal space. The “recovery pattern” is not clear. All kinds of things are possible. For the first time in years and years I don’t have to carry the responsibility for payroll. I don’t have to schedule my life around big meetings. But my psyche is busy trying to re-establish itself just like my leg. “You could start a You Tube channel.” “You could write a new book (it’s already mostly written).” “You could work on that novel you discovered you wrote in 2006 (and wasn’t bad).” You could conduct Vision Labs at your own home.” “What about executive coaching?”
  6. The biggest insight is that I need to take some time to experience myself in a completely new way. I’m suspecting that much of my adult life I’ve been guided by programming that is very deep and has a lot to do with how that little baby back in Two Rock initially encountered the world, and what I thought would work to keep my parents in touch with me, and what was okay and not okay regarding being myself. Ooops. You mean I learned to repress things to please my parents? But what things? And was getting attention for being an amazing artist and craftsperson what I really wanted, or a substitute for something else, like nurturing love? It’s helped that during this recovery time I’ve had time to continue reading Gabor Mates’ The Myth of the Normal. (If you want to understand the stress of our times it is a must read.)

I’m posting this piece in my blog because I think those of you who really care about awareness and facilitation and helping people get through life would appreciate knowing what a colleague like me is going through at a true turning point. I suspect I will look back on this event and this time as a gift, even if it just appeared out of the blue.

Nov 22, 2023

Nov 22, 2023h in Cognition & Communications, Collaboration Strategies, Contribution to the Field, Graphic Facilitation, Inspiration, Leadership, Mentorship, Personal Development, Personal Transformation, Strategic Planning by

 

giselasqureThis September Gisela Wendling became CEO of The Grove Consultants International, the comp20-dsatdellafattoriasmallany that I began in 1977 as Sibbet & Associates, and led through its incorporation as Graphic Guides, Inc. in 1988 and then the name change to The Grove in 1993. I want to share some reflections about our succession process, which is guiding me into the wonderful territory of life change.

Some Context

The Grove Consultants International, as many of you know, was early in the business of visual facilitation. We called the method Group Graphics® and found that strategy consultants who wanted to differentiate loved the process and propelled our work at Apple, General Mills, Federal Industries in Canada, General Electric, and Bongrain. Because no other consultants were working this way, we could use our methods as a calling card. People remembered us whenever we facilitated meetings.

We added a teaming practice in the 1980’s after Alan Drexler and I co-developed the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance ModelTM and its related survey. This has grown into its own business, with many tools, workshops, and licensees.

In the 1990’s The Grove grew rapidly with large, multi-year engagements with National Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard, and Mars, Inc. We developed large-scale Storymapping, and in the mid-nineties, Ed Claassen as our COO collaborated with me and the team to develop the Grove’s Strategic Visioning (SV) process and Graphic Guides.® These are the large graphic wall templates which are now ubiquitous. Again, we were one of the first to popularize this way of working. We conducted SV processes all over Silicon Valley as the Internet gained speed. We moved to our Presidio offices in 1998.

Visualization, teaming, and strategy guided us during the rocky 2000’s. The .com crash, 9/11, and then the great recession in 2009 impacted our company and the scale of projects clients would consider. But all three of our service areas continued to deliver results. After 2009 we moved to re-emphasize our origins as the Visual Meetings Company.

But life intervened. In 2013 my wife Susan died of cancer, after 46 years of marriage. Laurie Durnell and Bobby Pardini took over co-leadership of the company as I dealt with this enormous change. I was supported by my close friend Rob Eskridge, my counsellor Chayim Barton, and a dear colleague Gisela Wendling. Gisela’s life-long interest in change and Rites of Passages allowed her to help me hold Susan’s passing as a potential transformation. And it was. To our surprise, we fell in love and were married in 2016.

In 2014 Gisela joined The Grove as VP for Global Learning and senior consultant and we co-developed our Designing and Leading Change program to bring forward her work and take the Grove’s work to a new level. We also began the non-profit Global Learning & Development Network, or GLEN. While we could not have anticipated the pandemic, our focus on change and working virtually allowed us to pivot quickly to on-line workshops and direct help for our struggling client leaders. We could also see their organizations coping with the increasing impacts of climate change, economic ambiguity, climate migration, wealth gaps, political polarization, and many other challenges. Change was in the air.

Succession

Having Gisela at The Grove transformed our work and renewed my interest in consulting. She led a master’s program in organization development at Sonoma State after receiving her doctoral in human and organization systems and development. We co-authored Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change with Wiley after a successful Visioning and Change Alignment process at UC Merced. The integration of dialogue, visual practice, change management and use of self, began to define a new approach.

This fall Gisela decided after a week-long silent retreat in Holland and a short vacation in Belgium, to step up to the role of CEO and lead The Grove into a new era. Her passion is to help leaders and their teams “Realize Visionary Futures.” Her becoming CEO is coincident with the publishing of her new book, The Liminal Pathways Study. We collaborated on the design and illustrations, but the creative vision was hers and I followed!

Living the Liminal Pathway

Gisela’s Liminal Pathways Change Framework (LPF) re-envisions the archetypal three-phased process of Rites of Passage as identified by the French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep. Phase one is Separating. Phase two is the Liminal or “In-Between” phase. Phase three is Integration. Gisela’s framework highlights the inner and outer dynamics at play in each phase and the sequence of turning points that occur over the arc of a complete process. It is this process that is now unfolding for me.

I have let go of the formal position I held. I must also let go of large meeting graphic facilitation, involving our growing network of associates who are good at this. A year and a half ago, we let go of the Presidio offices, which we hadn’t used for three years during the pandemic to move into the warehouse where Grove Tools, Inc. run by Thom Sibbet as President, had a spacious upstairs office.

Entering Liminal Space

I am now deep in liminal space. I want my next moves to come from my deeper self. Already new rivers of interest are arising and flowing together but I am resisting being rushed. I asked for a vision this summer on my vision quest on Mt. Shasta and the takeaway was “constancy.” This is a different calling.

It is clear that I will be focused this next year in support as The Grove team responds to a new leader. Gisela is deeply appreciative of our historic ways of working and is visually very astute. The change work is proving to be an integrating approach. But the complexity of the post-Covid hybrid world is considerable and finding the best responses is challenging. Leaders of change need support as do their teams. I believe with Gisela’s leadership we can provide it.

At the same time, I’m fascinated with the way this liminal time is affecting me. I find myself feeling vulnerable, the way I did early in my career. I am also feeling full of all the capabilities that have developed over the 52 years of work all around the globe. In my field I would be considered an “expert” at process design and visual facilitation. But more and more I feel that my ability to connect broadly across many disciplines, organizations, and cultures may be more important than knowing how to use visualization. I’m asking myself, “What is the role of an elder?”

Working with The Light

Years ago, a workshop by Michael Meade provided a seed of insight that has been growing in my liminal space. Being an elder, he said, is the process of making a shrine to the spirit as the body falls away. And it is the blooming of my spirit that has my attention these days.

Another teacher, Dr. Niek Brouw, a Dutch somatic practitioner I and colleagues worked with in the late 1990s, defined spirit as our ability to handle light. It is reflected in our spine, the neurofibril optic trunk line that holds our bodies in coherence and connection. The idea of working with light itself has my attention. It is the work that our teacher Thomas Hübl invites.

This month Netflix brought out a short mini-series on Anthony Doerr’s amazing book, The Light We Cannot See, a story about Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl at the end of the war who intersects with a young German soldier in the French town of Saint-Malo as American troops freed France from the Nazis. The light within is as vast as the light in the world, he writes, and this young woman, is connected this way. It guides her in incredible acts of bravery broadcasting coded coordinates through readings of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that were instrumental in final days of the war.

I find myself moved by this story, and the need for using my inner light to guide me in this next phase, and for The Grove’s inner light to grow stronger as we move to support leaders who are daring to bring about visionary changes. I have a growing feeling that the confusion and incoherence of our times cannot be met just with logic and neatly arranged symbols on paper but needs the connection of people who share a vision of a world where people respect each other across differences and, and in Gisela’s words, are “empowered to be free and have choices.”

As I wait for my new direction to emerge, I stand by to respond to those who are responding to our broadcasts, who believe that authoritarianism and overcontrol is not a solution. I am recasting my understandings of graphic facilitation as a chance to embody differences and hold space for movement, evolution of the practice, and emergent insight. I’m wondering if returning to the origins of this work and teaching our new understandings might again transform the field.

My mentor Michael Doyle, co-founder of Interaction Associates and one of those bringing facilitation to organizational work in the 1970s, said as I began The Grove. “You can compete and defend, or you can share and lead.” I’ve followed his advice and carry it with me to this next phase. Stay tuned.