Category Archives: leadership

Postmortem as Prenatal

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

Feedback and root cause analysis:  If you’re like most people I know, you love neither.  I relish the former; my friend revels in the latter.  We make a great team!  We conducted a series of both recently, and yet another complementary relational phenomenon occurred to me:  These are not concluding activities; they are initiating.

Many of us procrastinate and dread feedback—both the giving and the getting.  On the other side of dread and gnashing of teeth, we sigh with relief when it’s ‘over.’  For more complex issues, just one session may not suffice—we must dig deeper—ask more questions, really dissect out the nerves, vessels, and tumors.  A good postmortem requires patience, curiosity, and a nimble beginner’s mind.  We never know what will emerge, and we follow clues with a balance of enthusiasm and realism.

So many times in the past week someone has told me, “This is very good information,” when I have either given or described feedback I received.  Very good indeed, and sometimes painful and humbling.  I did not sigh with relief and closure.  I inhaled deeply and prepared to contemplate longer—to gestate.  The figurative autopsies I assisted in this week served as developmental studies of our paths to current state. They shed light on the potential anatomy of better processes, understanding, and collaboration.

We dread the hard conversations.  We think if we can just get through them, we can be free and slink away.  But the joyfully ironic truth is, hard conversations are exciting and inviting beginnings.  If we both steel and soften ourselves to pass through these jagged archways, myriad new possibilities beckon.  We get to be the architects, together, of a much healthier new future.

Count Higher Than Two

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

I’m starting to hear echoes of 2016, when a friend posted, “Well, now we know where the dumb people live.”  To some, if you voted this year to re-elect the president you are wholly and irrevocably:  stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynist, monstrous, evil—and more.  You are judged and defined solely by this one action.  Nothing else need be known about you; you are garbage. 

It’s us vs. them, good vs. evil, either/or, with us or against us.

This profound yet effortless oversimplification, this refusal to acknowledge, let alone explore, the inherent complexity of any given individual, poisons us all too easily.  It is the venomous root of polarization.  David Blankenhorn, co-founder of Braver Angels, describes it so well in his 2016 essay, “The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People”.  He asserts that “binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories”—is the most dangerous habit of polarization.

It’s to the point where I myself feel unsafe to raise any nonconforming perspective among liberals, lest I’m attacked for upholding the toxic patriarchy I profess to oppose. How ironic that the movement of tolerance and inclusion, that claims acceptance and diversity as core values, not only cannot tolerate but violently rejects even benign and earnest internal dissent.

Can we see our political opponents as more than a malevolent monolith?  Can we allow for complex experiences we don’t understand?  Can we withhold judgment long enough to recognize and honor our shared humanity, before we respectfully condemn each other’s wrong-headed ideas?

Can we ‘count higher than two’ in our attitudes and interactions?  Our mutual survival may depend on it, and I know so few people willing to try.

Our voting choice was binary.  Our thoughts, emotions, speech, actions, and relationships should not be.

What We Need

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

It’s Election Day Eve.  Big day tomorrow.  What do you need? 

A few of us asked each other this question today.  I need to stay connected to my tribe and get good sleep.  Another needs to form a tribe, learn to reach out and connect on her own terms.  Others need safety.  Crystal ball, genie, group hug (but COVID GRRRRR), a certain election outcome…  I suggested maybe we need an hourly, one song, Zoom dance-along throughout the day.  The playlist is growing.

After multiple queries it becomes clear, as it always does, that more than anything, we need each other.  My Facebook friend, a Trump supporter, told me how a colleague came to work crying the day after in 2016.  He hugged her.  No matter what I think of his politics I need for him and me to stay friends, to commit to not abandoning each other as fellow humans and fellow Americans.  I’m not sure if that’s what he needs… I should ask.

We all need, once again as always, to feel seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved.  And we need to help others feel it, too.  This does not mean we are not held responsible for our words and actions, and the harm we cause with both.  Compassion and empathy are not exclusive of accountability and reform. 

We need vulnerability and courage.  We need to come alongside rather than come at.  We need to monitor and manage our own assumptions, to hold a mirror to ourselves and own our contributions to current state.  We need calm, discipline, breath, and self-control.

We need to heal.

We need grace—to give and to receive.