Nollind Whachell

I just realized something else with regards to letting go of control. It’s not just about letting go of controlling others but of yourself as well. In effect, our outward expectations of others are often entwined with our inward expectations of ourselves.

So this “radical openness” that I’m looking for applies not just to others but even more so to myself. That’s because by transforming my perspective of myself, I can in turn transform my perspective of others.

And strangely enough, I have been thinking about this the last few days, as I’ve been reflecting upon my life over the past couple of decades. When I do so, I see two aspects of myself. One aspect is the guy who was active in developing communities online around video games but was intuitively practicing Future of Work principles before I even understood what they were years later. The other aspects is a of guy who now understands many of these Future of Work practices but can’t find the right type of people to put them into practice.

In effect, as I said back around 2015 on Google+, I don’t feel like I’m meant to be helping organizations to transform. Instead I’m realizing I’m supposed to help people transform and they in turn will create new organizations. So kind of a bottom up approach rather than a top down one.

All said and done though, I still feel like I am putting this ingrained expectation upon myself to be something that I’m not which is why I’m still hanging out with people who are focused on organizational transformation.

The key thing that is making me realize I don’t have to “play the same game” as others is Carol Sanford’s foundational story within her book Indirect Work of how Phil Jackson transformed the Chicago Bulls. The emphasis being that he was able to transform the level of consciousness of a bunch of people who were playing a game.In effect, what’s stopping me from doing the same thing within the gaming environments I’ve been playing within most of my life already? In other words, why force myself to change and act in a way that feels alien to me, when I’m obviously more optimally suited for these gaming environments which to me already have an embedded space and mindset for “playing” in the first place.

For example, the other day I joking said on Twitter that maybe I should create tours into games like World of Warcraft to show business people how The Future of Work will work by immersing them in a guild setting and helping them to translate the meaning of what they’re seeing, so that can put these principles into practice in their own businesses. So instead of me going into businesses and meeting people there, I instead invite business people into gaming environments and show them people playing, learning, and working on a higher “level” there.

Actually, I don’t even need to target business people. I can just target gamers who are frustrated with the way that work works in their own lives which is probably why a lot of gamers are gaming more because gaming environments are helping them to meet their psychological needs that they may not be getting in their work environments. So it’s almost like I’m showing gamers how they can start a work (ad)venture with a company of people and emulate an entirely new way of working using practices similar to what they used to using in MMORPGs (which people like John Seely Brown have already proven are innovative).

All said and done, it is something I should explore and play with more as a potential possibility. In other words, I don’t have to follow the forced societal expectations I seem to be automatically putting upon myself. I can instead choose a different path of my own choosing. One that’s more aligned with who I truly am.

In closing, I’m reminded of an awesome paper by Daryl Conner from Conner Partners entitled A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner (which unfortunately appears to be gone now due them updating their entire web site platform).

Although Campbell’s storyline depicts a single movement from naiveté to wisdom, the same stream of events is replicated repeatedly for those on a mastery path. The heroic emergence from one set of challenges is the entry point for a new level of innocence and pursuit of the next Journey. Mastery calls for taking part in as many of these heroic cycles as is possible, related to a particular domain of knowledge, skill, or beingness. For those of us seeking mastery in the change field, this means repeating the heroic saga as frequently as circumstances and our courage and tenacity will allow.

In closing, I’d like to offer my bias about what is the most important lesson to be learned during these epic periods of professional/personal growth. All the illumination that takes place during these developmental leaps contributes to the wisdom we strive for but, in my view, there is one awareness that stands above all the rest in its creation of value for us and those we serve.

The profound awakening I’m referring to is the same one that unfolded for Sara—at a certain point during the Return phase of her Journey, she could see that all the hard lessons learned during her odyssey weren’t where her hero status proved its real value. Being worthy of the hero’s title isn’t demonstrated through endurance, dedication to a mission, or even slaying dragons, and certainly not by imposing “right solutions” on others. Ultimately, true heroes legitimize themselves, not by anything they do, but by being who they are. They come home from their trials and tribulations simply to live a different life. In doing so, they open the possibility of deeply affecting a relatively few people who, in turn, go on their own Hero’s Journey and return to impact a few more who are ready to learn.

As change professionals, the greatest leverage we have for affecting people is just to be who we are. Methodologies, concepts, and techniques are what we use when “exposing” large numbers to the technical aspects of how change can be orchestrated, but when deep impact within individuals is the agenda, there is nothing that comes close to the influence of a practitioner’s genuine authenticity on a small number of people. For Sara, this meant that the constituency she came back to serve was actually a relatively small number of her contemporaries who were already predisposed to grow in her direction and who naturally resonated with the full expression of who she is.

Daryl Conner, A Hero’s Journey for the Practitioner

Simply put, I think the issue here isn’t that I’ve been communicating over the years, it’s that I’ve been communicating it to the wrong people. I need to find my “tribe”, if you will. So I need to find my “constituency” of “a relatively small number of contemporaries” who are “already predisposed to growth in my direction” and who “naturally resonate with the full expression of who I am” (which sounds remarkable close to Carol Sanford’s description of “essence”).

Thinking about my last couple of weeks being on Twitter has made me realize and see another common pattern of mine that has probably existed for at least five years or more.

Basically whenever I join a new community or work environment, I’m initially trying to find a connection between myself and other people, which seems typically normal for most people to do. What happens next though is where my wanting to control others kicks in. As soon as a connection has been made with others, I suddenly have this expectation for others to begin to grasp what I’m communicating and begin to evolve to my level of consciousness. What then follows when this doesn’t happen is an increased expectation and an increased attempt to disrupt and thus control them, thus almost forcibly wanting them to change.

In a sense, I’m initially working indirectly and lightly, with almost no expectations, but when I see people connecting to what I’m saying, I suddenly shift into a more directand forcible approach.

This reminded me about a quote below from the book The Tao of Power by R.L. Wing which is a translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

Use attitude instead of action, and lead others by guiding rather than ruling. Manage people by letting them act on you, and not the other way around. In this way, your subjects will develop a sense of self-government, and you as their guide, will be rewarded with their loyalty and cooperation.

R.L Wing, The Tao of Power

Obviously people on Twitter are not my “subjects” but the emphasis here is still poignant. I’m definitely starting by letting people act on me but then later I shift to start acting off them more and more, due to my increased expectations that they should be changing, evolving, and grasping what I’m understanding at my level. In other words, the typical mindset of expecting others to “conform to our worldview,” regardless of it potentially being a more evolved one.

All said and done, this ability to step back and reflect on yourself is interesting and most definitely useful, especially when you can quickly get over the hump of beating yourself up over your actions by realizing that your actions are often ingrained and automatic. That’s the whole point. You’re trying to become more consciously aware of the invisible, automatic actions occurring below the surface of the simplest of things in your daily life, so that you can consciously choose to act in a more creative way, benefitting not just for yourself but for the other people you’re interacting with as well.

BTW I just realized something else in relation to this. I think there is need to get others to evolve and grow because I myself feel like I’m not evolving and growing. In effect, while I feel I am making headway, it feels like I’ve hit a wall of sorts. And that wall is obviously an existing paradigm that defines my current worldview which means I need a larger one which redefines my own identity to step beyond it.

In my last post, I mentioned about Carol Sanford talking about how to cultivate an “inner witness” which seemed to relate to triple-loop awareness. Specifically she mentioned about “self-observing” which is “separate from ongoing mental activity, that allows one to objectively observe this activity.”

For myself, I don’t think I’ve fully been able to achieve this, specifically in the moment that is, but more and more I’m become aware of myself reflectively, as I seem to be able to step back farther from myself. For example, today I had an epiphany that I began laughing at because it made my life feel like a tragic comedy.

Two decades ago, I began questioning my life and the way that work worked. Due to that questioning, I became increasing aware of how society often tries to force and control us to change, so as to fit in and conform to its expectations.

Discovering a different path to life from that experience, I wanted to help and “save others” from this crushing conformity, only to realize that I myself was trying to control and force others to change and conform to my own expectations, regardless of my own path feeling evolved.

In effect, I was no better than those people I was previously frustrated with because I was doing the exact same thing as them but just in a different context.

Today, in the process of stepping back further, I’m realizing now that I’m doing the same thing again but on another level. In wanting to create a development community, I’m again putting expectations on other people who I’d consider my peers which is bringing flashbacks of my experiences on Google+ again, where I felt like I was trying to “disrupt the disruptors.”

All said and done, I’m sick of this merry-go-round. I sick of trying to control people to “help” people…which when I say that reminds me of something I read a while back. A quote from The Handbook of Adult Development and Learning which refers to Susanne Cook-Greuter speaking about people at the post autonomous stage (although I most definitely don’t think I’ve achieved the construct-aware stage mentioned in the quote).

In what she calls the postautonomous stage (or at other times the construct-aware stage), people are described as changing in two significant ways: with respect to attitude toward language and with respect to ego as a mechanism of self-control. Regarding the new attitude toward language, in earlier stages of development, language is valued because it allows communication between people, enabling us to cognitively package reality into discrete entities placed in conceptual maps. In later stages, by contrast, language is experienced as filtering the underlying reality and detracting from much of the richness of experience.

People take a new attitude toward their egos at higher stages. Whereas in earlier stages, people take pleasure in thinking about their complexity and contradiction—that is, in thinking about themselves—at the construct-aware stage, people question their “objective self-identity” altogether, no longer wishing to be in control in the ways they have been by means of concepts and thinking (what I refer to as simulations). Self-control requires being too concerned with the image of self. People at the construct-aware stage yearn for a mode of being based on noncontrol, a mode of existing not requiring effort, grounded in “radical openness,” a mode not grounded in ego at all.

Handbook of Adult Development & Learning

In effect, the more aware I become of myself, the more distaste I have of what I’m becoming aware of that I’m doing.

All said and done though, I think I’ve reached a point now where I just need to focus on my own development going forward and primarily just on this site (since it allows me to have deeper discussions with my “self”). That’s it. I know I’ve already mentioned this once before but I think I need to take this seriously to heart this time.

I mentioned yesterday that the book Indirect Work by Carol Sanford appears to be about going beyond knowledge. Even more so, it seems to relate to triple-loop learning.

I remembered I had found a triple-loop learning paper before that articulated what the experience of triple-loop learning felt like and I found it again this morning. It’s called Timely and Transforming Leadership Inquiry and Action: Toward Triple-Loop Awareness (PDF), written by Anne Starr and Bill Torbert (who is a major contributor to the vertical development field).

One of the first quotes that jumped out at me from this paper was the following one.

Translating, he explains that triple-loop awareness re-presents a change in consciousness. It is the simultaneous awareness of all 4 territories of experience – of the outside world, one’s own behavior, one’s own feelings and thoughts, and at the same time, a kind of witnessing of all this. It can be called presencing (Senge et aI, 2004). Triple loop awareness occurs in any moment when there’s an attention distinct from the mental thinking, from the physical sensing, and from the objects of perception, infusing them all with an immediacy that is at once passionate, dispassionate, and compassionate. You’re more likely to have these experiences when you put yourself in a position where you’re on the edge of your known reality – on the not-necessarily-comfortable threshold between the known and the unknown.

Anne Starr & Bill Torbert
Timely and Transforming Leadership Inquiry and Action: Toward Triple-loop Awareness

Why this jumped out is because Carol Sanford also has a quote that relates to cultivating an “inner witness” in her book Indirect Work.

The deeper purpose of the intermezzos is to develop your capability to manage, filter, process, and discover ideas as they arrive in your mental space. This requires intentional self-observing, the creation of a conscious awareness, separate from ongoing mental activity, that allows one to objectively observe this activity. It is a common spiritual or consciousness-development practice, and in some traditions, it is referred to as cultivating an “inner witness.”

Once this witness is present, it becomes possible to really notice how we take in influences from others, whether we are reading their words, listening to them speak, or absorbing what they are modeling through their behavior. Learning is at least as much about how one engages with new information and experience as it is about the information itself.

Carol Sanford, Indirect Work

Returning to the paper, an example is given of a person describing their triple-loop awareness.

Quite apart from the profound personal experience that this was for me, it was also an unprecedented experience of a new kind of power. Being a constitutional worrywart, I was accustomed to thinking with limitation – seeing the barriers (in the “real” world) associated with attaining my desires (in “here”) as overwhelming. The emotional shock of this situation gave me a power and clarity I had not experienced before. Instead of seeing limitation, I saw only my intention and knew there were any number of ways it would be met. My desires and the real world were interacting in real time (the present). I never forced a connection or answer, but instead knew that things would fall into place. This felt physically like operating from above myself with infinite flexibility to play/enact in the world “below”. I should also say that I have not summoned this kind of power since then – unfortunately, not even to write this paper (Anonymous, 2004, with permission).

Timely and Transforming Leadership Inquiry and Action: Toward Triple-loop Awareness

This description is common in the more evolved stages of vertical development whereby one describes their experiences as being like on a “balcony” overlooking themselves and their life, seeing all of the interactions clearly going on below, thus no longer feeling trapped by them.

Carol Sanford describes this by being able to see “our projections on others” and taking them back.

Here at the level of living systems (which includes most Indigenous and some Asian worldviews), we start from the assumption that all living beings have their own agency and purpose. There is no need to impose our will or our ideas of what they should be; instead, our work is to cultivate the humility and receptivity that allows us to understand what they are striving to become. From this understanding, we begin to discover appropriate roles for ourselves within their processes of becoming. Our work shifts to evolving the infrastructures and instruments that will enable them to develop for themselves the capabilities they will need to make their own contributions to some other entity’s becoming. Those of us who aspire to play this role must engage in our own development, taking back our projections onto others and turning what had been outer work into inner work.

Carol Sanford, Indirect Work

If I’m understanding this all properly, every interaction with anything in our lives always has an intention to it. Only by stepping back from ourselves and intentionallyperceiving and seeing our own intentions in action, can we truly transform ourselves by changing those intentions. That’s what triple-loop learning gets to the heart of, our deeper intentions.

Carol provides an example of this in her book by describing how Phil Jackson’s unique coaching with the Chicago Bulls created a liberating space for them, letting them step outside of the typical intentions of the game and create their own.

This shift of levels from two to three forces is quite evident in the Bulls’ story. As Jackson directed his players’ attention away from winning and losing and onto the larger cultural meanings of basketball, he also helped them move their attention off the ball and onto the whole system of the game. This freed players and opened up a uniquely creative space within which they could invent new plays in present time and in response to all of the interacting dynamics of court and arena. Players learned to maintain consciousness of the whole of the situation, with its many layers and complexities, and this allowed them to escape the mechanics of the game and experience themselves as agents within a living phenomenon.

Carol Sanford, Indirect Work

Why I find this remarkable is that a lot of games I’ve played in the past, I automatically try to step back and see these undercurrents of the game going on as well. For example, in World of Tank Blitz, a tank simulation game, I noticed three primary types of players which I described as Tactical, Strategic, and Adaptive (primary in relation to situation awareness).

Basically these three tiers of players perfectly aligned with single-loop, double-loop, and triple-loop learning. Tactical players were focused on the question of “Am I utilizing my tank and attacking my target in the right way?” Strategic players were focused on asking “Am I attacking the right target?” And Adaptive players evolved to question “Is it even right to be attacking now?”

The hilarity of reflecting on this now and the poignancy of the question of “Is it even right to be attacking now?” is not lost on me. Our world is fractured and fragmented right now because of the way we perceive it and because of our projected intentions on others. Because of this, most people are spending most of their time “attacking” other people in one way or another.

Boom! Mind blown.

In using a new reading technique tonight to get a better understanding of the book Indirect Work by Carol Sanford, I finally broke through a barrier I wasn’t grasping until now.

Indirect development work is about going beyond knowledge.

Development, in other words, is not the same thing as training or knowledge transfer, which are direct ways of working. Development works on our ability to be awake with regard to ourselves, and this is inherently indirect.

Carol Sanford

Here’s some quotes that touch upon this below, first from Chapter 7, which emphasizes how our focus on knowledge actually fragments us from seeing living wholes. And I have to say, her use of the words “aggregate” and “integrate” did immediately make me think of personal knowledge management and building a Second Brain.

Such efforts to integrate multiple, diverse needs and bodies of knowledge are a hallmark of good design and can certainly lead to more sophisticated, holistic solutions and policies. But the process of accretion of information and action, no matter how comprehensive, will never on its own generate the shift in perspective that allows us to engage with a living whole. If anything, the tendency to aggregate and integrate only serves to reinforce the problems associated with fragmentation. This is because it derives its raw materials from the underlying practice of breaking things down into parts in order to understand them before attempting to reassemble them into something that makes sense.

Carol Sanford

And here are a few more quotes from Chapter Eight which show how her knowledge acquisition early in her life didn’t help her as much as what she calls resourcing does now, which is about tapping into your inner knowledge.

In the tumultuous time in my life when I was newly married and a student at Berkeley, I found myself in over my head. It had finally dawned on me that I didn’t know everything and that perhaps I didn’t really even know myself. I had always thought that learning was about mastering content—acquiring knowledge and the skills to put it to use. But as a student at Berkeley, I became increasingly aware that I didn’t know how to observe and manage my own thinking process, and that this was far more important than the content of my thinking.

Since that time, I’ve organized much of my life and work around the insight that real change comes when we engage consciously with our own mental processes. Along the way, I’ve become aware of the importance of what I call resourcing, which works on awakening in people their capacity for critical thinking and agency with regard to growing and expressing their personal potential.

Resourcing is not mentoring or coaching, both of which assume some kind of superior knowledge. Resourcing is not telling people what to do or guiding them into a better pattern of behavior or performance. Resourcing assumes that the potential to know lies within the individual and that what is needed is to awaken their thirst and discipline to find knowledge within themselves.

If I’m not mistaken, what I think she’s referring to here is an innate sense of wisdom. It’s weird and hard to describe but I think I understand what she’s getting at because in looking back upon my life tonight, I keep seeing these moments, like even in the mid 1990s when I was only 30 years old, where I was doing things intuitively in the online communities I was creating that I wouldn’t fully understand logically until a decade later when I was researching organizational development. Like I just trusted myself and my intuition guided me (although being in a playful space helped a lot).

If I’m also not mistaken, this definition sounds very familiar to triple-loop learning (i.e. “Triple Loop Learning gets to the core of things: our purpose, the values that guide us, and so on”) which I’ll check my research on it again later.

All said and done though, I’m not too sure PKM fans would take kindly to her work. They’d probably disbelieve it outright.

In terms of myself, I definitely want to go deeper down this rabbit hole.