7

The Third Stretch Is to
Step into the Game

We have met the enemy and he is us.

—Walt Kelly, Pogo¹

The third stretch is the biggest: from the sidelines into the game. If we want to get important things done in complex situations, then we can’t spend our time just watching and blaming and cajoling others. We have to step in.

In conventional collaboration, we focus on trying to change what other people are doing. These others may be people outside our collaboration who are the targets of our collective activities, or they may be fellow collaborators whose behavior we think ought to change. This approach works when we are in simple situations that are under control: when we can change what other people are doing. But when we are in complex, uncontrolled situations, we need to shift our focus onto what we ourselves are doing: how we are contributing to things being the way they are and what we need to do differently to change the way things are.

Stepping in means less distance and autonomy and more connection and conflict. It can feel thrilling and also terrifying.

“THEY NEED TO CHANGE!”

During 2005 and 2006, I was one of the leaders of an ambitious collaboration to reduce child malnutrition in India. The Bhavishya Alliance consisted of twenty-six organizations, including Indian government agencies, the United Nations Children’s Fund, multinational and Indian corporations, and local nongovernmental and community organizations. These organizations assigned fifty-six members of their staff to work full-time in a “social laboratory” for eight weeks. This team’s assignment was to cocreate a first set of innovative cross-organizational initiatives to reduce malnutrition. This initial effort set Bhavishya up for a successful six years of work on a series of initiatives that made a significant impact on malnutrition on India, and it became an important example of cross-sector collaboration.²

The biggest impact of Bhavishya on me, however, was from what was not successful during the first eight weeks.

The lab started off with high expectations and high pressure. The participating organizations had invested a lot to get this complicated project going. At one point, the complexity of what we were organizing overwhelmed me, and I turned for advice to Arun Maira, a businessman and public servant, and asked him what, really, we were trying to do. “You have to remember,” he replied, “that most of the time when a group of stakeholder leaders get together to work on a problem, every one of them believes that if only the other ones would change what they are thinking and doing, then the problem would be solved. But if all the stakeholders are involved, then it can’t all be the fault of others! The real innovation here is that we are inviting these leaders to reflect on how they might need to change what they themselves are doing.”

As the deadline to deliver the initiatives approached and the stress increased, I began to worry that our design would not work, and my leadership contracted and hardened. I became more distant from the team, and my understanding of what was going on and my capacity to deal with it thoughtfully diminished. But I thought that if I held on more tightly to our plan and pushed harder, I could get the work over the goal line.

On the last day of our eight-week process, we held a meeting where we proposed four initiatives to the heads of the participating organizations (the bosses of the members of the lab team). We had worked hard and were exhausted but satisfied with where we had gotten to.

The bosses, however, saw things differently. Several of them were critical of our proposals and doubted that they were sound or viable. By the end of the day, almost none of our work had been approved. The team felt bewildered and distressed. I felt devastated.

The team spent three days debriefing this surprising and upsetting end of the lab. Everyone was disappointed and hurt. Many of them blamed me for what had gone wrong. More than ever before in my life, I felt humiliated and angry.

I left India and went home. Every single day for months, I stewed over how I had been mistreated and fantasized about how I would get revenge. I knew that I had made some mistakes and needed to change how I handled such situations, but I thought I was being victimized and that others needed to change too: that I shouldn’t be expected to work on myself unless others were doing the same.

Then one day I came across a pamphlet written by the philosopher Martin Buber, which contained the following paragraph:

This perspective, in which a man sees himself only as an individual contrasted with other individuals, and not as a genuine person whose transformation helps towards the transformation of the world, contains a fundamental error. The essential thing is to begin with oneself, and at this moment a man has nothing in the world to care about than this beginning. Any other attitude would distract him from what he is about to begin, weaken his initiative, and thus frustrate the entire bold undertaking.³

In reading this, I saw that I was making exactly this fundamental error: I was distracting myself from what I needed to do. It was not useful for me to focus on what those people I saw as my enemies should be doing: I needed to focus on what I should be doing differently to deal effectively with the challenges I was facing.

This is a pattern of behavior that I have often observed in myself and others. When we are faced with a challenging situation, we focus our attention first and foremost on what other people are doing or not doing or ought to be doing. As Maira said, our habitual thinking is that “they need to change!” The others we want to change may be far away or close by; they may be specific individuals or faceless populations; we may consider them friends or enemies. Humorist Jerome K. Jerome writes, “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”⁴ Blaming others is a common and lazy way to avoid doing our own work.

The question about collaborating that I am asked most frequently is, “How can we get them to . . . ?” This question betrays a hierarchical and black-and-white mind-set: us versus them, friends versus enemies, heroes versus villains, good versus bad, innocent versus guilty. But in nonhierarchical, noncontrolled, stretch collaboration, we cannot get anyone to do anything, so we need to take a different approach.

We blame and enemyfy others, both to defend and to define ourselves. We see ourselves self-centeredly as the protagonist at the center of the drama of what is going on around us, so when we experience a challenge, we react as if it is a personal attack against which we must defend ourselves. We are frightened of being hurt, so we separate and shield ourselves by asserting that we are right and the others are wrong. We fear that if we collaborate with those others, we will become contaminated or compromised—that we will betray what we stand for and who we are.

Philosopher René Girard says that we create enemies as a way to avoid dealing with conflict within our communities or within ourselves, as discussed in a piece in the Raven Review:

We . . . control internal conflict by projecting our violence outside the community onto a scapegoat. . . . The successful use of a scapegoat depends on the community’s belief that they have found the cause and cure of their troubles in this “enemy.” Once the enemy is destroyed or expelled, [the community experiences] a sense of relief and calm is restored. But the calm is temporary since the scapegoat was not really the cause or the cure of the conflict that led to his expulsion. . . . Too often our identity, and in particular our sense of our own goodness, is dependent on being . . . against someone or something else. . . . We need the other to be wicked to know we are good and whether or not they are actually wicked is beside the point.⁵

The problem with enemyfying is not that we never have enemies: we often face people and situations that present us with difficulties and dangers. Moreover, any effort we make to effect change in the world will create discomfort, resistance, and opposition. The real problem with enemyfying is that it distracts and unbalances us. We cannot avoid others whom we find challenging, so we need to focus simply on deciding, given these challenges, what we ourselves will do next.

IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE PROBLEM, YOU CAN’T BE PART OF THE SOLUTION

There are two ways in which we can understand our relationship to and role in a given situation. One way is to see our role as like that of the director of a play who is instructing the actors on the stage, or like that of a spectator who is watching the play. In both of these cases we see ourselves as being apart from and outside of the situation, and the situation as being created from above (by the director). The actors are creators of the play, but the director is the paramount leader or super-creator.

Two Ways to Relate to a Situation

You are a director or spectator of the
actors in the situation; you are apart from
(above or outside) it

You are one of the cocreators of the
situation; you are a part of (within) it

The other way to see our role is like that of an actor, or like a “spectactor” in the kind of play put on by Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal, where the audience also participates in and influences the action on the stage.⁶ In these cases we see ourselves as part of and within the situation—as one of the participants in cocreating what is happening.

In stretch collaboration we are cocreators. And in this role we are able to make wise decisions about what to do to affect our situation only to the extent that we are able to balance ourselves.

We become unbalanced by overlooking ourselves: by focusing on what others, rather than ourselves, need to be doing. The boon we obtain by shifting our attention from the former to the latter is that we liberate ourselves and give ourselves agency: now we have a direct opportunity to effect change. Instead of blaming others and pushing or cajoling or waiting for them to do their work—which rarely succeeds—we can get on with our own.

Getting on with our own work requires us to see and acknowledge our own role and responsibility. Leadership scholar Bill Torbert once told me, “The old activist quip, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’ actually misses a more important point, which is that if you are not part of the problem, then you cannot be part of the solution.” Unless we can grasp how what we are doing is contributing to our situation, we will have no way to change that situation, except from above, by forcing.

Stretch collaboration therefore requires that we see ourselves as part of, rather than apart from, the situation we are trying to address. I can phone home to say that I will be late “because I am in traffic” or “because I am traffic.” The latter explanation explicitly opens up my options to work with others to change the situation.

We also become unbalanced in the opposite way, by seeing ourselves as the center of the world. Self-centeredness means that we arrogantly overestimate the correctness and value of our own perspectives and actions, and we underestimate those of others. This impedes collaboration because it distorts our understanding of the situation we are in and what we need to do, and it creates conflicts with the others we are discounting.

We contract self-centeredly when we are frightened of losing our position and identity. More than only being afraid of failing, we are afraid of being a failure. Moreover, many of our most cherished identities—expert, professional, authority, leader, hero—impede collaboration because they place us hierarchically above or apart from others. Collaborating with others, especially others who do not agree with or like or trust us, requires us to join with them, shoulder to shoulder, as peers and equals. It requires us, as Anja Koehne said, to abandon “feeling superior as a condition of being.”

Arun Maira often reminded me of the pitfalls of self-centeredness. “You shouldn’t take things so personally,” he once chided me. “Things happen that you have to deal with, but it doesn’t help for you to make them all about you.” Another time, I asked him how we could know if the large-scale change work we were doing was having an impact. “Your wish to prove that you are making a difference is egotistical,” he said. “Keep in mind the key sentence of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘The work is yours, but not the fruits thereof.’ ”⁷ This advice liberated me to do my work conscientiously but without taking on responsibility for outcomes I could not control.

BE A PIG RATHER THAN A CHICKEN

The essence of the third stretch is assuming responsibility for the role that we ourselves are playing in the situation we are trying to change, and therefore for what we need to do differently in order for the situation to change. This stretch is challenging because it requires us to take the risk of engaging fully in the situation and so being changed or hurt by it. It requires us to be willing to sacrifice some of what feels known, familiar, comfortable, and safe. “In a ham omelet,” the quip goes, “the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.” Stretch collaboration requires us to be pigs rather than merely chickens.

Fifteen years ago I a series of several workshops with a Paraguayan colleague, Jorge Talavera. My Spanish was not very good, and neither was his English, so our communication had to be brief and to the point. We became attentive to the moment in a workshop when the team’s work would suddenly start to advance, which we called “el click.” This click, we observed, was the moment when the team members saw, usually with surprise and often with consternation, that in order for the situation they were working on to change, they themselves—not only others—had to change.

I have noticed the impact of this click on my own work. When I am lazily blaming others for what is going on, I feel unhappy and helpless. But when I see and commit to what I can do about what is going on, I feel alert and energetic. This does not mean that I am always successful in affecting what is going on—but I am successful more often. The projects I have really thrown myself into (including Bhavishya and the others recounted in this book) have been the ones that have had the greatest impact and have taught me the most.

The essential practice required for stepping into the game is, then, to attend to ourselves. When we notice ourselves blaming others—focusing on what they are doing and what we hope or demand that they do differently—we need to bring our attention back to what we ourselves are doing and what we need to do differently. Sometimes what we need to do is to try to influence others—but now we are taking responsibility for, and willing to change, our part in the situation that we are all part of. Whenever we find ourselves distracted by others, we need to come back to the simple question, what must we do next?