Do you, like me, have a love/hate relationship to feedback?

I try to be open to feedback, but it’s an uphill battle. I’m a fairly defensive person. Whether that’s due to upbringing or nature, I’ve long since given up trying to find out why. I’ve just learned to manage it (sort of). Probably my big breakthrough moment came about 7 years ago, when I was working with the Portland Police Bureau on re-designing their Crisis Intervention Training (now part of their Behavioral Health Unit). I was part of the initial team running the pilot. After each day, the facilitators would stand in front of the room, and have participants critique each section. It had to be rigorous, because this was the last stop before going live with it. That was what I call now a “no-frills” approach to giving feedback. We needed them to be ruthless and honest, and they were.

It was tough, but it taught me a few things about getting, asking for and making use of feedback.  Recently, I asked you, readers of this blog, for feedback on the blog, as I’m going to be making some changes over the next few months. Reading through your responses (which I’ll share soon), was enlightening, and gave me more thoughts on the feedback process. Continue Reading…

It’s a remarkable story. A good friend of mine – practically overnight and without planning to do so – became a Member of the Greek Parliament. Some of you readers may know Vassiliki Katrivanou. A Process Work trainer, facilitator and filmmaker, who worked internationally, Vassiliki was living in her native Athens after almost a decade living abroad. She arrived back in Greece just in time for Greece’s biggest crisis since the end of the civil war in 1949.

Greece is in the middle of a crisis of enormous proportions: a political, financial, social, and as Vassiliki adds, constitutional crisis. People are living on the edge: 30% unemployment, 50% of youth unemployed, and no sign of development or a way out of the crisis in sight. And, as history has shown, in the midst of desperate times, ideologies like fascism become attractive. A new neo-Nazi party, the Golden Dawn has emerged, and is now the third largest party in Greece.

Vassiliki wasn’t a politician, but as the famous saying goes, the times make the person. A window of opportunity opened and Vassiliki was asked to stand for election with the Syriza Party, the new Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece. The new left coalition came to power in response to the crisis, and includes  different groups of the left and independent politicians. The Syriza party is now the second largest party in the Greek Parliament, and the main opposition party. Continue Reading…

Did you know it’s our anniversary?

Yes, five years ago this month, I started A User’s Guide to Power, with this inaugural post on power, democracy and leadership.

A lot has changed since 2008. Five “internet years” feels more like ten in the real world. For perspective, back when this blog launched…

• There was no iPhone
• Facebook had just started to become available to users outside of universities and high schools
• Twitter was just out of beta (and most people didn’t know what it was)
• Hillary Clinton was ahead of Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary

Seems like forever ago, doesn’t it? Continue Reading…

Architect. Chef. Surgeon. Shoe Designer.

Those are big dreams for any kid. But especially for the “Dreamers,” the 60 or so eighth graders I’ve been working with in the I Have A Dream program.

You can’t be what you don’t see. If no one in your family ever went to college, or graduated high school, if you seldom or never see someone like you in a professional career or in a leadership position, then you can’t see yourself doing it either.

Continue Reading…

Definitely not as catchy as the original: We’re Here. We’re Queer. Get used to it.

But way more successful.

And that is how, it came to pass, that gay rights won. Well, it’s far from over, but the Supreme Court weighing in on the constitutionality of DOMA certainly indicates that gay marriage in the United States, and all the rights therein, will soon be law. It might take 5 years, even 10, or it could be as soon as next year. Undoubtedly there will be setbacks, appeals, and challenges, but it really does seem that in my lifetime, I might actually be able to marry my partner. Continue Reading…

Last week, driving into work, I heard an old interview on Fresh Air with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. And later in the day, I came across an interview with Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

And in both cases I was struck by the relatively mundane events the authors managed to turn into best-selling books. They’re both history books, but not the kind of history we’re used to reading. No big wars, no kings or queens or dictators of note. They both took two unremarkable events and through their persistence and passion, found an epic story. Continue Reading…

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, just isn’t getting the response she had hoped about her soon-to-be launched book and social movement, Lean In: Women, Work and The Will to Lead. Her message to women to lean in and raise the number of women sitting at the table is clouded by the real numbers about women in work:

• The largest group of people likely to live in poverty in the United States are women
• The gap in poverty rates between men and women is wider in America than anywhere else in the Western world
• Women are poorer than men in all racial and ethnic groups.
• Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty. Over a quarter of black women and nearly a quarter of Latina women are poor. Black and Latina women are at least twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty.

(From the Straight Facts on Women in Poverty)

If these women leaned in any further, they’d fall over. Continue Reading…

Ruby Bridges is 58 years old today. But she made history before she was old enough to even understand the importance of her actions. She was 6 years old when she broke down a racial barrier and entered Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She was too young to understand why the police had to escort her the school. She didn’t understand why parents took their children out of school. She didn’t understand the yelling crowds in front of the school that first day. And she didn’t understand why only one teacher, Barbara Henry, was in the school. Day after day, for an entire year, Barbara Henry taught to a classroom with only Ruby in it.

Ruby understands now. And what she understands is that racism has to be taught. At the time she entered school that day, with police escorts, angry mobs, and racial slurs being yelled at her, she knew nothing about the racism that raged around her. “None of us know anything about disliking one another when we come into this world,” she says today. “It is something passed onto us. We should never look at a person and judge them by the color of their skin. That’s the lesson I learned in first grade.”

Last week I wrote about setbacks, and interestingly (coincidently?) this week was a lesson in the importance of constraints. Constraints aren’t the same as setbacks. Setbacks are unexpected and are experienced as random events, whereas a constraint is inherent in the project itself. But both test our patience and resolve.

Our limits are seldom personal; if we’re working for, or with a group, what we experience as a limit is often a part of the system itself. And the beauty of limits, as I was just reminded, working with a group yesterday, is that your limit forces you to reach out for help, to share your struggles and make it a team, and not just a solo project. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s easy to become heroic and try to push past a constraint, forgetting that we can only go as far as the system itself can.

And without constraints, there is no creativity. The two dimensional canvas, the inflexibility of the sculptor’s wood, the non-negotiable deadline, the 140 character tweet – these limits produce impossible and creative results. And constraints are the key to innovation, as this post from last week shows.

And constraints create relationship. I attended a final project presentation as part of the graduation week at the Process Work Institute, and saw Hellene Gronda’s presentation about the nature of the edge that upholds identity. Having an edge or limit, she says, defines us but also limits us. And yet, precisely that limit creates a contact surface. We know ourselves only in opposition to something else. A limit, therefore, enables relationship, intimacy, love.

But to have limits, as I was reminded working with a group yesterday, is counter-intuitive. We want to muscle through, to push past, to take it as a sign of weakness. We need, as Hellene said, to be “edge activists,” to admit our limits and let the alchemy at the contact with the unknown  take over. Hellene closed with a quote from Derrida which I find appropriate here as well,

I have to lack a certain strength, I have to lack it enough, for something to happen. If I were stronger than the other, or stronger than what happens, nothing would happen. There has to be weakness, which is not perforce debility, imbecility, deficiency, malady or infirmity. […] This affirmation of weakness is unconditional; it is thus neither relativistic nor tolerant (from Derrida, J. & Ferraris, M. (2001). I Have a Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: United Kingdom, Polity Press)

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working away on a couple of projects, and it seems I keep  encountering one setback after another. Either that, or progress is just slower than I’d like. That could very well be the case since this whole thing has been a terrific test of my (lack of) patience.

Today has been particularly depressing. I got sick on the weekend, which set me back, and I’ve been wrestling with a chapter for what seems like weeks, which just refuses to be submitted. Whenever I think I’ve got it nailed, another little piece suddenly pops up, which means having to rewrite other sections.

And when things go poorly in one area, there seems to be a bleed through effect. Everything feels sluggish and slow.

It’s not all hopeless though. There are a couple of things I’ve discovered in this miserable process. Continue Reading…