Last week the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest and largest Islamist organization, a group that has been banned, off and on in Egypt since 1948, won 47 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament.

Which leads me to ponder a question that has always intrigued me: how does a political party, or an individual for that matter, make the transition in identity (and action) from a radical activist position, outside the mainstream, to the head of government?

Major political transitions are seldom considered to be psychological as well as political events, but how could they not be? The citizens of the former east bloc countries didn’t just wake up one morning with a democratic understanding, attitude and behavior. Growing up in a totalitarian regime results in a state of mind, a set of behaviors that doesn’t shift when government does. Being a member of a banned, radical extremist group to suddenly being the party in the seat of power is a profound shift in identity. Looking at history, the track record for making this transition is not good. Many radical parties entered through revolution and proceeded to jail, torture, ‘re-educate’ or assassinate opponents.

It takes people years to grow into their sense of power, to grow from a young adult dependent on others to being the one responsible for others. Companies grapple with this all the time. Someone is promoted from front line or factory floor into a management position but doesn’t or can’t fill those leadership shoes: they see their new staff still as colleagues, and react competitively with the people they are meant to develop. And this is true everywhere, not just in the business world: parents struggle with this, often failing to recognize their higher rank and resorting to yelling, screaming, even violence when provoked by their children. Teachers who feel insecure or who need their egos stroked are every student’s nightmare. (more…)

My nephew posted this on his Facebook wall this morning:

We all have dreams, but how much are you willing to sacrifice to realize yours? Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Indeed. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Martin Luther King Jr died at 39. And he predicted his own death. On the eve of his assassination he said, in an eerily prescient passage:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.

Taylor Branch, the historian who wrote a trilogy of books on the life of King, said in the PBS show, Citizen King,

The Movement took a huge toll on him. When they did the autopsy, they said he had the heart of a 60 year old, he’s 39. So yes, it took a big toll on him, and he was constantly fantasizing about getting out of the Movement

(more…)

The death of Vaclav Havel yesterday reminds me of the essence of politics, the greater sense of service and community that defines politics in its purest form. Havel, a dissident, playwright and the first president of the Czech republic after the fall of communism, believed in a politics was that was “a practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.”

His rhetoric about community and relationship is missing in our current polarized and polarizing political climate. Long before people spoke of emotional intelligence, Havel was championing it. In discussing what he learned during his tenure as President of the Czech Republic, Havel says he realized that the most essential assets for any politician are

fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation: all these are immensely more important in politics.

Is there still room for such kind of politicians? Am I naïve to believe that politics could someday embody these ideals? Perhaps. Yet I hold out the hope that we can and will get there one day.

In the movie Bulworth, Warren Beatty plays Senator Jay Billington Bulworth a “suicidally disillusioned liberal politician who puts a contract out on himself and takes the opportunity to be bluntly honest with his voters.” It’s a great movie. And an even greater premise – that a politician doesn’t take on the problems of his constituents, but puts them back onthe people as problems of their own making.

It’s the primary season and next year is an election year, and I’m already dreading the prospect of sitting through two more years of hearing that our problems are the fault of Big Government. Doesn’t anyone else see that as a contradiction? Am I alone in thinking this creates the very problem people are criticizing,  making government responsible for the problems of big government? (more…)

I’m here in Denver at the 2011 Worldwork Conference – 260 people from all over the world, learning about the planet and its vast problems, and also learning how to facilitate and resolve conflict. Today I’m part of the facilitation team. Sitting here over my coffee, getting ready for the day, I’m reminded of my post, “Leading Under Fire,”  which I originally called Game Day. I’m reposting it here, and I think I’ll also give it a re-read, reminding myself of all my good points, as I get ready for the day. Enjoy!

Read the full post here.

Black History Month is over, and we’re now into Women’s History month. Forgotten history, unrecorded stories, marginalized peoples, all need their own month to remind us and encourage us about our past and future. If that’s the rationale, then we also need a Personal History Month to remind us of our own hidden histories and how they still live in our every mood and moment. When it comes to personal development, psychology is guilty of eclipsing the impact of history, except for our childhood and family of origin stories. We don’t consider enough that who we are is a habit of history. We carry with us the vestiges of our ancestors, and much of our personality, behavior, beliefs and habits, for both good and bad, are the legacy of those who came before. (more…)

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation: (more…)

Last month, I spoke about the problem of transfer and ‘expert syndrome’ -over extending one’s sense of expertise to the point of enacting the expert role in fields in which one is not qualified. The deeper problem is one of self-reflection, really seeing who you are: on one hand, not confusing yourself with your role of expert, and on the other hand, understanding that you are, at the end of the day, just a role.

Barack Obama, for whatever reason, has got a grasp of this person-and-role truth. In a Newsweek interview with Daren Briscoe, Obama says:

I had become a symbol for the next thing. So some of it was undeserved, but what it told me was that people really were looking for something different. I joked with my team, and it wasn’t entirely a joke, it’s something I still think about – that the country was looking for a Barack Obama. Now, I’m not sure that I am Barack Obama, right? But they were looking for an idea like that.

Today both the idea and the man took office amid great pomp, circumstance and celebration. I’m curious, as I’m sure many of us are, how Obama will handle the role of POTUS, and the office, with its tendency to isolate, inflate and distort. Hanging onto his Blackberry is one problem; hanging onto this sense that he is, after all a role, and not just a person, is another. I look forward to the next four years and watching this unfold.

The past is never dead. It is not even past.

– William Faulkner

I just finished a Process Work seminar here in Auckland, the second in a series of three. Last week I was in Brisbane, and tomorrow I’m off to Tokyo for a training on workplace bullying (and to watch the US elections from abroad). This weekend’s seminar was called, The Unfinished Work of Ancestors. I wanted to explore how lineal issues, problems inherited from previous generations, determine, influence, and shape our current relationships and family life.

It struck me over the course of the weekend that not only are many of the issues and patterns we grapple with in relationship inherited habits of history, but also how relieving and liberating it is to view our chronic relationship challenges as ‘lineal’ problems – social, historical and political issues that our ancestors struggled with. We are positioned in history, shaped and influenced by social, historical and even natural forces – and the echoes of the great potato famine, World War II, the harsh lives of coal miners in Scotland, of itinerant workers, of Russian peasants reverberate in our intimate interactions, daily habits, and moods.

For instance, perhaps due to the seminar’s setting of New Zealand, the so-called “New World,” for Anglo-Europeans, immigration, refuge, deportation, and itinerancy were themes people connected to their relationship struggles . The immigrant or refugee psychology reflects itself as a lack of certainty, of ‘being-at-homeness,’ never certain of our foothold, of whether the world could sustain or welcome us. What looks like fear of commitment, intimacy problems, or feeling a lack of permission to be yourself with another, for many, was a reflection, amplified through the generations, of the fears and anxieties of their ancestors in a strange land, only tenuously and temporarily hosted by its peoples and government.

Individual psychotherapy, the habit of looking inward, while yielding tremendous insights, needs to be complemented, at least occasionally, with this broad sweep of history. We are who we are for so many reasons, and to realize that our strange tendencies and pesky moods are not only to be found in a psychology text, but in a history book, is, at least for me, a huge relief. What won’t yield to self-reflection and inner probing might best be explained and even resolved by reading the history that our forebearers lived.

My friend Robert King, among whose many talents is drawing, has been commissioned by a local cafe here in Portland, the Bipartisan Cafe, to draw portraits of the forgotten leaders of North America: Native American leaders such as Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, and others. Robert will be giving a presentation at the cafe, this Wednesday evening, April 23, from 7 pm – 9 pm on how these forgotten leaders fit into U.S. history.